An ambitious plan by the Massachusetts Institute of Technology's Media Lab to develop and distribute a laptop computer costing no more than $100 is expected to take a major step forward next month with the receipt of the first order.
China is expected to order 3 million machines and Brazil is expected to buy 1 million of the laptops. He's looking for three more nations--one each in Africa, the Middle East, and South East Asia--to commit to laptops orders, in addition to supplying some to the U.S., before the machine goes into production, hopefully sometime in 2006. "The rest of the cost [beyond $100] is there to support an absolutely obese, overweight, and unreliable operating system. If you get rid of that and start with a thin, tiny operating system you can do an awful lot," Negroponte says. |
