One Laptop Per Child

I came across this non-profit organization on Friday called One Laptop Per Child. OLPC is focused on bringing inexpensive laptops to the children in impoverished countries of the world, with laptops costing just $100 dollars to produce.

Any nation's most precious and valuable natural resource is its children. We believe the emerging world must leverage its children, tap their innate capacities to learn and share and create on their own. Our answer to that challenge is the XO laptop, a children's machine designed for "learning learning."

They are small, with a 7.5 inch LCD screen, and a (quite impressive) resolution of 1200x900px. The OS is based of Red Hat's Fedora Core 6 distribution of Linux, and it comes with several basic applications such as a Mozilla web browser. It runs a 366MHz AMD Geode processor, and instead of a hard drive, it has 512 mb of flash RAM which is apart from the computer’s 128MB of DDR266 system RAM.

The individual and societal consequences of this chronic global crisis are profound. Children are consigned to poverty and isolation-just like their parents-never guessing what the light of learning could mean in their lives. At the same time, their governments struggle to compete in a rapidly-evolving, global information economy, hobbled by a vast and increasingly urban underclass that cannot support itself, much less contribute to the commonweal, because it lacks the tools to do so.

These laptops are not yet available for public distribution. Visit laptop.org for more information.