(earthtimes.org) - The One Laptop Per Child project, which envisages providing every child with a $100 laptop, has started in the right earnest with the first 10 of the laptops shipped to kids in Third World countries by the Taiwanese manufacturer, reports Trend.
The project is the baby of Nicholas Negroponte, the founder of Massachusetts Institute of Technology Media Lab. The first laptops were tested at the US State Department this week. The One Laptop Per Child was conceived as a means of allowing children from poor countries to acquire computer literacy. The machine, which is a hand-cranked shaft, includes many features present in more expensive laptops like a camera and microphone and wireless Internet.
The laptops have 128MB of memory and 512MB of storage and run on Linux OS. The project has received support from huge corporations including Google. News Corporation owned by media mogul Rupert Murdoch, is contributing $500,000 towards the project.
The project has already signed agreements with the governments of Brazil, Argentina, Libya, Nigeria and Thailand to distribute the laptops through education authorities. Earlier in the week, Mr Rupert Murdoch said that his company was committed to supporting the project over the next four to five years.
"What we want to do is see every child in the world anywhere have their own computer," he added. "There's an amazing amount of innovation that has gone into this, and we are very hopeful it can make a very big change in the world."