A former MIT professor embarked on a project years ago to as many laptop computers in the hands of children - mostly in developing countries - possible. The "One Laptop Per Child" campaign was intended to produce a laptop computer with a price of $ 100 to facilitate the project and ensure that even the poorest countries could afford to participate in the program.
The first 10 of the laptops shipped to children in Third World countries has now happened. The One Laptop Per Child (OLPC) project is the brainchild of Nicolas Negroponte, the founder of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology Media Lab.
Just this week, the first laptops of this initiative has been tested at the US State Department. The machine is powered by a hand-driven crank shaft and includes many features that are present in more expensive laptops as a camera and microphone in addition to wireless Internet capability.
This $ 10 laptop computers feature 128MB memory and an appeal to 512MB of storage (without a hard disk is available) and run on the freely available Linux operating system. The project has the support of major companies, including Google and News Corp., the global media conglomerate led by Rupert Murdoch. News Corp. is a contribution of $ 500000 direction of the project.
In addition to the support of an impressive number of companies, the initiative has already signed agreements with the governments of Brazil, Argentina, Libya, Nigeria and Thailand to laptops through education authorities.
Earlier this week, News Corp. CEO Murdoch explained that his company was committed to supporting the OLPC project for the coming four to five years.
"What we want to do is to see each child in the world over have their own computer… there is a surprising amount of innovation that has gone into this, and we are very hopeful can make a very big change in the world”.
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