Nicholas Negroponte, founder and chairman of MIT's Media Lab, is heading up a project with the goal to distribute specially designed laptops, each with a price tag of less than $100, to more than 150 million schoolchildren within the next three years. That's an amazing statistic, considering that PC makers will manufacture only about 50 million laptops this year. A prototype of the laptop will debut in November at the World Summit on the Information Society in Tunis, Tunisia. The first 5 million to 15 million laptops could be distributed by the end of next year or early 2007, with another 100 million to 150 million to be handed out a year later. The first countries to distribute the laptops will be Brazil, China, Egypt, South Africa, and Thailand.

The first-generation machine likely will employ a dual-mode LCD display found in inexpensive DVD players but that can also be used in black and white, in bright sunlight, and at four times the normal resolution--all at a cost of less $30.

Despite cost-cutting, these machines will be robust. Negroponte envisions a Linux-based, full-color, full-screen laptop that will use innovative sources of power--including wind-up--and will be able to do most everything except store huge amounts of data. These rugged laptops will be Wi-Fi- and cell-phone-enabled, and have at least four USB ports. Its current specifications are: 500 MHz, 1 Gbyte, 1 megapixel.