In your face, Microsoft!

There is an excellent article here at the Wall St. Journal about the latest thing to come out of MIT's Media Lab...the sub $100 computer. It is very much challenging the established computer industry in it's design and aims. First, it can run off of either electricity, or a hand crank...yes, you read that correctly. A hand crank. It also doesn't use the standard LCD display technology either, with a hi-rez black and white mode, along with a lower rez colour mode. (Note, I use the form "hi-rez" so that people don't confuse it with Hi res Root Beer).

Of course, it is using Linux as it's operating system...but there are some really phenomenal things that are going to come out of that project...you see, two very notables are part of the team working on the interface, long a weak spot in Linux, with the exception Enlightenment window manager. Those two are Seymour Papert, inventor of the LOGO computer language, and Alan Kay, inventor of Smalltalk, which pretty much is the inspiration of all Windowing software on computers today. So, I expect some really wonderful things to come out of this project, both hardware and software wise.

Here is a photo of the prototype:

And here is another of Nicholas Negroponteand and Kofi Annan demonstrating the machine at the recent international internet confrence in Tunis:


Although it won't initially be available for sale, within a year, they hope to have it on the market, with a price tag of about $200. They hope to supply millions of these computers to children underdeveloped countries around the world. And with the help of Red Hat, MIT, AMD and Google, they probably will!

ttyl