Garrett Saundry
The program was conceptualized by Nicholas Negroponte from Media Lab. He sketched out an idea for a $100 laptop and sent it to his good friend Hector Ruiz, who just happened to be CEO of AMD. The response he got from AMD was that not only would they be involved, but that they’d like to take on a lead role in the project. A few weeks later and News Corp and Google also joined in as founding members of the newly formed One Laptop per Child program. This project was first publicly announced in November 2005 at the World Symposium on the Information Society. Two prototypes were shown, but they were very rough and a lot of development work was still needed. In 2006 at the World Economic Forum in Switzerland, the United Nations Development Program announced that they would work with OLPC to deliver the technology and resources in underdeveloped countries.
It was then announced that the program would be run by faculty members from the MIT Media Lab. The funding came from a number of sponsor organizations including AMD, Brightstar Corporation, eBay, Google, Marvell News Corporation, SES, Nortel Networks and Red Hat. These companies have all donated several million dollars towards the project. Intel was initially involved in this project, however they dropped out and have been concentrating on developing the Classmate PC, which is still a low cost PC, however it’s being developed as a for profit project and not a nonprofit one as the OLPC machine (XO) is.
The laptops, which are run with open source Linux, are bright green with a LCD screen. They are low power and 
contain flash memory, like a USB stick instead of a hard drive. The laptop has a built in video camera, microphone as well as long range WiFi. One of the interesting things about this laptop is that it has no moving parts. Hard drives, floppy drives, CD/DVD drives or fans. There are however two USB ports which will allow you to connect peripherals. The shell is resistant to dirt and moisture and has a pivoting reversible display, moveable rubber WiFi antennas and a rubber membrane keyboard. There are 10 different keyboard layouts to suit the standard keyboard for the country that the laptop will be shipped to.
Pricing
The laptops were initially planned to have a price of around $100USD. However with the cost of development on the nonprofit project, initial cost estimates for the first laptops is more in the $150-$200USD range. The goal of $100USD per laptop is planned for some time in 2008.
Core Principles
- Child Ownership
- Low Ages
- Saturation
- Connection
- Free and Open Source
Give One Get One Program
This program was conducted from November 2007 through 31 December 2007. What this did was allow for a donation of $400USD ($200 of which was tax deductible) which would provide a laptop to a child in an under developed country as well as one for yourself. This program was a great success and approx 83 500 donors participated. The one issue that was encountered however was that several months after the donations were made, about 10% of the donors still had laptops that hadn’t been shipped to them.
This project has been struggling for the past few years in signing contracts, development costs and support issues. The goal however has remained the same: To provide children around the world with new opportunities to explore, experiment and express themselves. It gives opportunities to children that they have not had before. That in itself is enough reason to keep this project alive and running.