MIT Media Labs wants to produce $100 laptops. Media Lab team members Nicholas Negroponte, Seymour Papert and Joseph Jacobson have a vision of "one laptop per child", and plan to provide 100 million to 200 million laptops to school children in the developing world by the end of 2006. Google and AMD have committed $2 million each to the project and MIT is also working with Samsung, Motorola and News Corporation on this project.
Specs include a 500 MHZ processor, wind-up power, a 12 inch flat rear-projection color screen, Linux and OpenOffice software. Devices will be Wi-Fi and 3G-enabled with lots of USB ports. The laptops will use flash memory (no hard drives) and will not be hooked up via a conventional local area networks. The laptops will use Wi-Fi mesh networks, where one laptop will act as the print server, one the DVD player, and another the mass storage device, etc.
The first working prototype is projected to be ready by September 1 with limited distribution by the end of the year.
See http://laptop.media.mit.edu/ for more details.
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