Progress toward the hackable kidtop

One Laptop Per Child (laptop.org) hit the news in January 2005 at Davos, when Nicholas Negroponte of the MIT Media Lab announced plans for a "$100 laptop" in a quantity of 100 million, to "revolutionize the way we educate the world's children". Formal plans for the project were announced in August, and we covered it for the first time in the November 2005 issue of Linux Journal.

Since then much progress has been made. Jim Gettys -- prime mover behind the X Windowing system, handhelds.org and earlier fun projects like the Unobtainium (a wild hack on Compaq's original iPaq) -- is now VP of Software Enginieering. And there are prototypes. The current generation is fitted in bright orange and green and features rectangular bunny ears (802.11s mesh network antennae) a lid that twists and flips to form a pad, and a dual-mode display that the project wiki says "can readily be mass produced in standard LCD factories, with no process changes", and "has higher resolution than 95% of the laptop displays on the market today; approximately 1/7th the power consumption; 1/3rd the price; sunlight readability; and room-light readability with the backlight off".

While the units are designed for kids (the keyboard is 6/10 the size of an adult one), they're also made to hack. Writing on his blog, Ethan Zuckerman says,

...the 500 prototype boards currently built come with a VGA jack soldered on… but production models will leave the jack leads etched on the board, though unpopulated. Want to turn a laptop into a device that can drive an external monitor? Solder one on. Also on the board but unpopulated will be connectors for additional RAM and flash memory, as well as a mini-PCI slot.

And, while some large companies (AMD, Google, News Corp., Red Hat) are involved, the whole project is very much a work in progress, and open to interest and help with what promises to become the most widespread and good-hearted Linux deployment on Earth.

- Doc Searls

Note: Download images for printing here: http://www.laptop.org/download.en_US.html

Also, I'm sure we covered Jim Gettys' Unobtainium sometime back there. After looking around Google, I'm pretty sure it was in late 2001, since Jim showed it to me at OSCON in the summer of 2001.