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A laptop for one and all?

"When computer industry executives heard about a plan to build a $100 laptop for children in the developing world, they generally ridiculed the idea. How could you build such a computer, they asked, when screens alone cost about $100?

Mary Lou Jepsen, the chief technologist for the project, likes to refer to the insight that transformed the machine from utopian dream to working prototype as "a really wacky idea." Jepsen, a former Intel chip designer, found a way to modify conventional laptop displays, cutting the screen's manufacturing cost to $40 from $100 while reducing its power consumption by more than 80 percent. As a bonus, the display is clearly visible in sunlight.

That advance and others have allowed the project, One Laptop Per Child, to win over many skeptics in the past two and a half years. The cost is now closer to $150, but five countries - Argentina, Brazil, Libya, Nigeria and Thailand - have signed on to put the computers into the hands of millions of students, with production expected to begin by mid-2007."

An interesting article, with equally interesting ramifications if the "cheap" laptops become generally available, in the IHT.

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