“This is the moment we have all been waiting for,” Gustavo Arenas of AMD told the BBC News. Five years after the concept was first proposed, the $100 laptop is poised to go into mass production. The first machines should be ready to put into the hands of children in developing countries in October 2007.
“There’s still some software to write, but this is a big step for us,” Walter Bender, head of software development at One Laptop per Child (OLPC), told the BBC News (videos).
Professor Negroponte first proposed the laptop in 2002. Getting the $100 laptop to this stage has been a turbulent journey for the organisation and its founder Nicholas Negroponte. The low-cost laptop has been both lauded and ridiculed.
Intel chairman Craig Barret famously described it as a “$100 gadget” whilst Microsoft founder Bill Gates questioned its design, particularly the lack of hard drive and its “tiny screen”.
Other critics asked whether there was a need for a laptop in countries which, they said, had more pressing needs such as sanitation, water and health care. Professor Negroponte’s response has always been the same: “It’s an education project, not a laptop project.”
As time passed, some of the critics have changed their stance. Earlier this month, Intel, which manufactures what was considered a rival machine, the Classmate PC, joined forces with OLPC. The innovative design has also drawn praise from the technical community. Using open source software, OLPC have developed a stripped-down operating system which fits comfortably on the machine’s 1GB of memory.
“We made a set of trade-offs which may not be an office worker’s needs but are more than adequate for what kids need for learning, exploring and having fun,” said Professor Bender. “The laptop needs an order of magnitude less power than a typical laptop,” said Professor Bender. “That means you can power it by solar or human power.”
The XO will be produced in Taiwan by Quanta, the world’s largest laptop manufacturer. Test machines, on which the final design is based, are currently being put through their paces by OLPC. Field testing is also being done in countries such as Nigeria and Brazil.
However, the names of the governments that have purchased the first lots of machines have not been released.
The XO currently costs $176 (£90) although the eventual aim is to sell the machines to governments for $100 (£50).
The O’Reilly Open Source Convention, July 23-27, 2007, at the Oregon Convention Center in Portland, Oregon, is where people working in free and open source software gather to share ideas, discover code, and find solutions. Oregon State University’s Open Source Lab is one of One Laptop’s key development centers. They will be demo the latest One Laptop build, among other things.
A Software Defined Radio (using GNU software), can integrate many different telemetry bands using software. The Portland State Aerospace Society was at OSCON last year, demonstrating their open source software defined radio for telemetry (DailyWireless MP3 interview).
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