By Cyrus Farivar
Posted Tuesday, Nov. 29, 2005, at 3:31 PM ET
At the World Summit on the Information Society two weeks ago, MIT’s Nicholas Negroponte unveiled the laptop he believes will digitize the developing world. The cute green computer sports a WiFi card, a 500 MHz processor, a 1 gigabyte flash drive, and a novel power source—a 6-inch hand crank that juts out from the side. It will run free, open-source software, most likely some derivation of Linux. All of this for the low, low price of just $100.
Negroponte promises that bringing cheap laptops to countries like Brazil, Thailand, and Egypt will help “children to ‘learn learning’ through independent interaction and exploration.” That might be true, but this green machine won’t be the computer to do it, no matter how much Kofi Annan and the international press fawn over it. The $100 laptop is a huckster’s gambit—poorly thought out, overly ambitious, and too sexy to be true.
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Don’t forget the Sinclair personal computer. My dad soldered one together from a kit that cost something like $99 or $199 in 1984. You connected it to your TV.
You might also be interested in the FREE “iT” from Asiatotal which is supposed to come out soon. Lots of caveats of course: http://psdblog.worldbank.org/psdblog/2005/11/free_computers_.html
Cool. Thanks for the tips. $99 in 1984 is worth $183 in 2005 dollars, btw.
My handcranked flashlight cost $ 24.00 at Bartell’s drugstore. Actual manufacturing cost, of the electricity generating mechanism must be no more than $ 5.00. if that, in China.