Last week, The One Laptop Per Child initiative put a name on their first laptop device. The new name is “Children’s Machine” or CM1, apparently taken from the title of Seymour Papert’s book of the same name (published in the early 90s.) There isn’t a signficant amount of technical update. I should mention, though, that the team has brought up Forth on the laptop recently. I used Forth at Atari Coin-op and I can attest to its ease of debugging hardware. Redhat is still slated to deliver a “skinny” version of Fedora Core to be shipped on the laptop.

The laptop boasts energy savings and out-of-the-box networking capabilities. The display can operate in two modes; the transmissive mode consumes just one watt, and the reflective mode consumes only 0.2 watts. The mesh networking capability allows users to talk to one another and to the Internet with no configuration. Another energy-saving trick is that since the laptop nominally consumes a mere 2 watts it can be charged by human elbow-grease.

The laptop is a “… flexible, ultra low-cost, power-efficient, responsive, and durable machine with which nations of the emerging world can leapfrog decades of development–immediately transforming the content and quality of their children’s learning.”, according to their website.

Some additional links about the laptop:

A revolution in a laptop
The Laptop Crusade - Wired
See My Blog for more blogs on the One Laptop Per Child initiative

Tecbnorati: OLPC

For more about personal multimedia, see my site: brainFlakes