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Goal: $100 laptop for kids

A nonprofit group envisions more than 100-million hand-cranked computers connecting the world.

CAMBRIDGE, Mass. - Researchers at Massachusetts Institute of Technology want to get a computer into the hands of every child in the world, even if there's nowhere to plug it in.

The design has to be durable, self-reliant and, above all, cheap. About $100.

The machines' AC adapter would double as a carrying strap, and a hand crank would power them when there's no electricity. They would be foldable into more positions than traditional notebook PCs, and carried like slim lunch boxes.

For outdoor reading, their display would be able to shift from full color to glare-resistant black and white.

And surrounding it all, the laptops would have a rubber casing that closes tightly, because "they have to be absolutely indestructible," said Nicholas Negroponte, the MIT Media Lab leader who offered an update on the project Wednesday.

Negroponte hatched the $100 laptop idea after seeing children in a Cambodian village benefit from having notebook computers at school that they could also tote home to use on their own.

Those computers had been donated by a foundation run by Negroponte and his wife. He decided that for kids everywhere to benefit from the educational and communications powers of the Internet, someone would have to make laptops inexpensive enough for officials in developing countries to purchase en masse.

In January, Negroponte joined Media Lab colleagues Joe Jacobson and Seymour Papert 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. 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.

Within a year, Negroponte expects to get 5-million to 15-million of the machines in production, when children in Brazil, China, Egypt, Thailand and South Africa are due to begin getting them.

In the second year - which is when Massachusetts Gov. Mitt Romney has said he hopes to start buying them for all 500,000 middle and high school students in his state - Negroponte envisions 100-million to 150-million being made. (The world's existing annual production of laptops is about 50-million.)

While the initial goal of the project is to work with governments, Negroponte said MIT is considering licensing the design or giving it to a third-party company to build commercial versions of the PC. "Those might be available for $200, and $20 or $30 will come back to us to make the kids' laptops. We're still working on that," he said.

"Our interest is really in Third World development," Papert said. "I believe that it's essential to solving the problems of poverty, violence, and environment, to have better education."

While a prototype isn't expected to be shown off until November, Negroponte unveiled blueprints at Technology Review magazine's Emerging Technologies conference at MIT.

Among the key specs: a 500-megahertz processor (that was fast in the 1990s but slow by today's standards) by Advanced Micro Devices Inc. and flash memory instead of a hard drive with moving parts. To save on software costs, the laptops would run the freely available Linux operating system instead of Windows.

The computers would be able to connect to Wi-Fi wireless networks and be part of "mesh" networks in which each laptop would relay data to and from other devices, reducing the need for expensive base stations. If just one laptop has direct access to the Net, others can easily connect to it and share a single online connection. Plans call for the machines to have four USB ports.

Perhaps the defining difference is the hand crank, though first-generation users would get no more than 10 minutes of juice from one minute of winding.

This certainly wouldn't be the first effort to bridge the world's digital divide with inexpensive versions of fancy machinery. Other attempts have had a mixed record.

Negroponte says his team is addressing ways this project could be undermined.

Information from the Boston Globe and CNET.com was used in this report.

[Last modified September 29, 2005, 01:20:09]