MIT’s Media Lab demo’d prototypes of their $100 laptops today, May 23rd. Here’s a photo gallery of the OLPC $100 laptops that are targeted at children in developing nations …and they’re some sweet little machines. Putting aside the issues of black- and gray-market sales of these systems the whole rest of the project is incredibly well thought out.

Our “custom-configured” Windows world has a lot to learn from the design of these little machines. By standardizing both hardware and software configurations they’ve managed to implement 802.11 wireless-mesh networking and a minimal-IT-required Linux system. Should the operating system or software get messed up or infected (…however unlikely that is on Linux) - the whole system can be reimaged without worries of data loss. How do they manage to store data without any expensive servers? Each machine only has 512MB of FlashRAM/non-volatile storage and is designed to share data via a community (the local mesh, I think) wiki system. Sounds a little like Windows roaming profiles, except without the bloat and ability for users to still store data on the local drive; also way ahead of the server-centric network PC/thin client systems encouraged by Oracle, Citrix, Wyse and many hardware manufacturers.

The whole project is well documented at laptop.org, so take a look for yourself.

Article tagged: $100, MIT, media+lab, OLPC, one+laptop+per+child, project, laptop.org, laptop, network+PC, thin+client

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