World’s First $100 Laptop Unveiled at Media Lab

The world’s first $100 laptop, built by MIT’s media lab and intended for distribution throughout the developing world will be unveiled today. The Boston Globe reports that the idea was born in 1999, when Media Lab co-founder Nicholas Negroponte and his wife set up two schools in Cambodia and equipped all of the students with laptops. He was so impressed with the results that he now wants to create a laptop cheap enough to provide one to every poor child in the world. According to the Globe, Negroponte joined Media Lab colleagues Joe Jacobson and Seymour Papert in January to create One Laptop Per Child, a nonprofit organization to design and distribute the ultra-cheap computers. The group is working with chipmaker Advanced Micro Devices Inc. of Sunnyvale, Calif., and Jacobson’s own company, E Ink Corp. of Cambridge, which makes ’’electronic ink” display screens. The paper reports that these displays consume a fraction of the power used by today’s laptop screens, and could be made for as little as $30 each, far cheaper than current laptop screens. Read more.

–A. Jahnke