For the past year I've been reading various news articles that talked about efforts to create a cheap laptop that would cost no more than $100, and be provided to children in third world countries as an educational tool. Various parties (Microsoft, for one) have pooh-poohed the effort as "pie-in-the-sky", useless, or impossible to achieve. MIT, however, took on the challenge, and has recently presented several successful prototypes.
As you can see from these
images, these laptops are attractive, versatile, and rugged. They will have a 500 MHz processor, a 12" screen, 128M of RAM, 500M of flash memory (no moving parts that a hard drive would have), use Linux as its operating system, and have four USB ports allowing a lot of peripherals to be connected, and capable of easily being networked in an "ad-hoc" fashion. The laptops were originally going to be able to be powered by hand-cranks (for those areas with limited access to electricity) but now the latest development is to keep all moving parts off of the laptop and instead develop a crankable power source that the laptop can be plugged into.
I've been following this story at Slashdot.com, where members of the community have posted hundreds of comments debating about all the pros and cons of this project. This discussion is as fascinating as any that I've read here. Are these laptops good-looking or ugly? Do they have enough horsepower to be useful? Is this the most important thing that kids in the third world need? Where would these be distributed? (Check out the proposed distribution map.)
As intriguing as this story is, perhaps the most interesting thing is a proposal by one guy to try and get a commercial angle on this project. The project is set up under the auspices of the UN, and it is not intended that these laptops will be sold for retail consumers at all. Although The Powers That Be for this project have refused to consider any retail operation, he's hoping that if he gets one million people to pledge that they'll buy THREE of them, keep one and donate the other two to the One Laptop Per Child effort, that perhaps they'll change their minds. After all, if this is successful, that should net 2 million of these that could be made available to the rest of the world. It's a gamble, but it's a charitable effort that follows the successful "PBS model", where both the giver and the recipient get something out of the deal. I personally like it because
- This is a great way for the netroots community to get involved with an interesting world aid project.
- This guy is going out on a limb to try doing something REALLY BIG.
- These laptops look to be an excellent half-way machine between a PDA (which is too small to really be useful) and a laptop (which can be too big to constantly lug around).
- They're damn cute, and as more than one slashdotter observed, they look like they'd be great chick-magnets.
Check out the links for yourself, read (or at least sample) what the Slashdot community has to say, and consider making a pledge.
Update:
Wow, this diary entry isn't even 10 minutes old, and I already have to make a correction: the pledge site is looking only for 100,000 pledges, not one million. My bad.