Nicholas Negroponte, founder and chairman of MIT's Media Lab, showed attendees the screen of the Hundred-Dollar Laptop

http://www.technologyreview.com/articles/05/08/issue/editor.asp?trk=nl

excerpt:
Nicholas Negroponte, founder and chairman of MIT's Media Lab, showed
attendees the screen of the Hundred-Dollar Laptop, or HDL. Beginning in
2006, he said, he would build 100 million to 200 million HDLs every
year--and distribute them to the children of the poor world. Many
attendees had read about Negroponte's idea and dismissed it as quixotic.
Hearing how an HDL might be built, seeing a part of it, and realizing the
scale of the project produced a rustle of delighted interest.
Negroponte recently wrote to me about what he hoped the HDL would do:
"Education: one laptop per child. Whatever big problem you can imagine,
from world peace to the environment to hunger to poverty, the solution
always includes education. We need to depend more on peer-to-peer and
self-driven learning. The laptop is one important means of doing that."
Can a $100 computer be built? Maybe. Negroponte does not plan to use three
expensive components of conventional laptops: Microsoft Windows, a
traditional flat-panel screen, and a hard drive. Instead, the HDL will be
loaded with Linux and other open-source software; its display will use
either a rear-projection screen or a type of electronic ink invented at
the MIT Media Lab; and it will store one gigabyte's worth of files in
flash memory.
The HDL has a number of other, intriguing features. Since many villages in
the poor world do not have electricity, the machines may be powered by
either a crank or "parasitic power"--that is, typing. Once turned on, HDLs
will automatically connect to one another using a "mesh network" initially
developed at MIT and the Media Lab. In the mesh network each laptop serves
as an information-relaying node. Households that have HDLs will be able to
communicate with each other by e-mail or voice calls.
Most importantly, Negroponte wants every mesh network to have access to
the Internet. The laptops will be loaded with Skype, a communications
application that provides free telephone calls. Consider: the most forlorn
parts of the globe might become part of the wider world.