I’d Like To Give The World a …$100 Laptop!

Nicholas Negroponte has a mission. It’s to outfit the third world with $100 laptops to get everybody surfing and to put the power of the internet into the hands of the poor. Men’s Journal included a story by Paul Hochman about this endeavor.

“Despite its low price, the computer is not a bare-bones throwaway. “It will be a Linux-based, full color, full-screen laptop,” Negroponte says. ‘It will be rugged, use a wind-up charger, be Wi-Fi and cellphone enabled, and have USB ports galore. “The design challenge for producing the computer, available in 2006, centered around reducing the price of the screen, which is responsible for half the cost of the average laptop. The solution: a mechanism that resembles a minature rear-projection television. The free Linux operating system also brought down costs.”