$100 Laptops for Children

The first $100 laptops are to reach children in the developing world in the next few days, the consortium developing them has said.

The One Laptop Per Child laptops, produced by a group of designers and engineers led by Nicholas Negroponte – co-founder of the Media Lab at Massachusetts Institute of Technology – would begin arriving “within the next week,” the project’s chief technical officer, Mary Lou Jepsen, explained.
The design for the $100 Laptop is very innovative, centering on a CPU, or processor, that saves power by knowing when to turn itself off.

The reason the CPU is usually on on a laptop is simply to refresh the screen, so in the timing controller chip for the display we put some memory – so when nothing’s changing on the screen, it goes into self-refresh mode to save power,”the project’s chief technical officer, Mary Lou Jepsen told BBC news.