The $100 Laptop
Today I read that the $100 laptop is ready to go into production. At present it costs $176 but, hey, close enough. For sure, the price will drop when billions of them have been sold. True the machine is very basic and there is a case for saying that kids in poor countries need clean water, sanitation and more food before they need computers but I still think it's a great initiative. As a teacher it's no surprise that I see education as the key to so many of the world's problems. Kids with a computer have a wealth of info on their hard drive so if their local library is a day's donkey ride away they can still read. The new machines are tough, durable, waterproof and have no moving parts. They can be powered by solar energy, a foot pump or a string pull. There were times when I was living in Brunei that I would have loved to have been able to boot up my laptop with a string pull.
It used to take a room-filling machine to get the same computing power those kids will have on the new laptops. The first computer I ever saw had to be plugged into a cassette recorder to receive its program. Ah, Granny's Garden on the old BBC computers. I never did really master that game. I'm old enough to have had to start a computer from the DOS prompt and type in commands to make it do things.
I remember the arrival of Windows 3.1. I tried it and then uninstalled it because it needed more system power than I could spare. It worked and looked great but it was like wading through treacle. Hmm, come to think of it those of you trying to use Vista on your old machines are probably going back to XP about now for the same reason.
You can read the story at http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/technology/6908946.stm
It used to take a room-filling machine to get the same computing power those kids will have on the new laptops. The first computer I ever saw had to be plugged into a cassette recorder to receive its program. Ah, Granny's Garden on the old BBC computers. I never did really master that game. I'm old enough to have had to start a computer from the DOS prompt and type in commands to make it do things.
I remember the arrival of Windows 3.1. I tried it and then uninstalled it because it needed more system power than I could spare. It worked and looked great but it was like wading through treacle. Hmm, come to think of it those of you trying to use Vista on your old machines are probably going back to XP about now for the same reason.
You can read the story at http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/technology/6908946.stm
Labels: laptop; computers
posted by Kay @ 6:16 PM
1 Comments:
At August 12, 2007 2:33 AM,
Anonymous said…
This week I was listening to a radio 4 item on how seriously universities in south america (venezuela?) take their responsibilities to the larger community. They load books onto Mules to take them to remote villages in the highlands. These are known as bibliomulos to the kids in these villages who are overjoyed to see them come with new stories and new learning. Now the bibliomulos are branching out using the fact that these villages often have remarkably good mobile signals to take laptops with them and link the kids to the web. These of course are ITmulos.
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