dekstop: weblog

There are more and more details emerging about MIT's/Nicholas Negroponte's $100 Laptop, and the more is revealed the more exciting it sounds. Kofi Annan has just unveiled the first prototype at the World Summit on the Information Society in Tunis, and there are a lot of other important people involved (apparently Rupert Murdoch is among the sponsors).

This project is a rare (yet well-publicized) example of individuals at the right places joining force to not only develop a technology that might change the world, but also doing so openly and without financial merit for themselves. Negroponte puts it best:

I'd love to see industry compete with us and come in at lower prices. To us the best thing we could do is to have people take the idea, replicate it, copy it, and make it cheaper. That would be to us a dream come true.

This excerpt from Ars Technica's coverage of the accompanying press conference nicely sums up some of the technical details, and provides hints towards the technological inventiveness involved in such a product:

Mary Lou Jepsen, CTO of OLPC, provided just a few tantalizing tech bits about the display technology, as well as stating that the motherboard will be mounted beneath it. It will not be an LCD, but rather some kind of LED technology that will make a modified portable DVD display of 480x234 produce an image equivalent to 800x600 with a pixel density of 150 dpi. Power usage is apparently magically low too, with Negroponte claiming that "one minute of cranking will provide 30 minutes of use," though this did not factor in wireless usage. Presumably, 802.11 will be used in conjunction with mesh networking for ad-hoc connectivity from a central access point.

It's going to be exciting to watch this project evolve, and to see it deployed. And it's also going to be interesting to see how technology of this kind changes our life back home in the "civilized" world; the laptop itself will not be for sale, but good (technical) ideas are valued everywhere. I'd certainly like a hand crank for my own laptop sometimes...

Update: BoingBoing links to a new Wired article on this topic, with an interview with Nicholas Negroponte. Best quote:

Wired News: So you're shipping this with development tools installed?
Negroponte: Yes. Absolutely.

And the piece also reminded me that I'm really looking forward to my first laptop where the main storage device is on a chip. In several ways, this low cost computer is ahead of the much more expensive technology we already own.

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