Over the past year or so I’ve followed the story of the One Laptop Per Child campaign in the media. In case you’ve never heard of it, this project has aimed to produce a $100 laptop that can be mass-produced and sold to the governments of developing countries in bulk orders of 100,000 or more and then distributed to school children. When I first heard of OLPC I found it to be a bit quixotic and far-fetched, but after reading more into the subject, it’s quite intriguing. The guy heading the campaign, Nicholas Negroponte, is also the founder of Massachusetts Media Lab which contributed a good deal of research and development. Not incidentally, his brother John is a high-ranking American ambassador and currently the Deputy Secretary of State. So here at least we have the wherewithal to get this thing off the ground.
Now to examine the laptop itself. It’s an extremely clever and obviously well thought out design. The New York Times’s technology columnist David Pogue recently made a little video demonstration of the laptop. It’s astounding what they can stuff into a machine for so little money. I’ll let the video speak for itself. What really piqued my interest about the newest iteration of this story is the fact that I can actually buy one of the laptops myself during a two-week window in November. I pay $400 for one of my own to play around with and this also pays for a laptop for a child in a developing country (not to mention a sweet tax deduction).