One laptop per child initiative ($100 laptop)

I remember the first contact I had with this idea of having $100 laptop was due to a movie, some geeks assigned to work on this unrealistic $100 laptop. I remember I laughed about this. How could you have $100 laptops? What not to add into that laptop? Well, I remember that in that cheap movie they geeks managed to build the laptop.Well...it was a movie.

$100 laptop

When I first heard about the real project of One Laptop Per Child I thought that people went nuts. Again...how could you possibly build a 100 dollars laptop? I have some good friends working on a car factory nearby. They have some constraint called Eco or something like this, where they try to replace components with less expensive ones. I remember these friends telling me how they do it and search for the better alternative everyday. I can only imagine how hard the task was for the guys building this 100 dollars laptop. Really hard...

Then when the project was available on the market, I have heard on our local news channels how our government wanted to invest in this, to buy a lot of those cheap laptops for our children that don't afford a real laptop. Well, at least a real computer, not necessarily a laptop.

I don't know what happened, as far as I remember I never heard of this project going further with our government but I just remembered about it today while reading an article on the internet, at Profy.com and I just felt the need to write about it. I know it is not about rugged laptops, but this One Laptop Per Child initiative is a good one, despite the fact that in the beginning I believed it is a stupid thing, since I could not see the solution for it. But, hey, not everybody has the same ideas, right?

That is why I want to support Laptop.org website and the whole initiative of each child having a laptop, even if it is a $100 one. Or, as Laptop.org says and I quote them here "While we do not expect every child to become a programmer, we do not want any ceiling imposed on those children". Give information to children, give them computers, give them at least $100 laptops, one per child. They will be happy and they will gain a lot out of this.

I only hope this won't turn into a political thing and lost its targets...