$100 Laptops Soon To Be A Reality for Poor Children
Portable Computer For a us$100?
The director of the Fundación Omar Dengo, Clotilde Fonseca, announced yesterday that by the end of this year or beginning of 2007, the us$100 computers will be a reality.

The computers will only be made available to students of grade and high school and will not be sold to the general public to avoid a black market for the inexpensive, yet functional computers.

The special pricing is part of a program by the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) who are supplying children in poor countries with the opportunity to develop computer skills.

The contract to manufacture for the low priced computers went to Quanta Computers, a leading designer and manufacturer of notebook computers from Taiwan.

The MIT's One Laptop per Child (OLPC) was created by Nicholas Negroponte and other faculty members from the MIT Media Lab to design, manufacture, and distribute laptops that are sufficiently inexpensive to provide every child in the world access to knowledge and modern forms of education.
The laptops will be sold to governments and issued to children by schools on a basis of one laptop per child.

These machines will be rugged, Linux-based, and so energy efficient that hand-cranking alone can generate sufficient power for operation. Mesh networking will give many machines Internet access from one connection. The corporate members are Advanced Micro Devices (AMD), Brightstar, Google, News Corporation, Nortel, and Red Hat with a contribution of at us$1 million for each company.

The inexpensive computers will have a small LCD screen, similar to portable DVD players and a yellow hand crank that provided complete portability, not requiring to be plugged into an electrical outlet, for use in remote areas.

The machines will be light weight (designed to be carried by children), have sufficient RAM memory to make it useful to do homework, though it will not have a hard drive.