Nicholas Negroponte’s One Laptop Per Child project hopes to start mass-producing low-cost computers by the middle of next year, according to The New York Times. And with that deadline bearing down, some interesting details about the machines are starting to emerge.
Project officials have announced that the laptops — which will be given to schoolchildren in nations across the world — will come with an adapted version of Csound, a popular sound compiler. Csound was designed by Barry Vercoe, head of the Music, Mind, and Machine group at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology’s Media Lab, which Mr. Negroponte once led.
In its unabridged form, the sound compiler is fairly complex. But Mr. Vercoe is streamlining the programming language so that students will be able to compose their own music and share it over ad hoc wireless networks.
Creating those wireless grids will be an important task for project officials, and they plan to use different networking tactics in different nations. In Libya, Internet connections will come via satellite downlinks. In Nigeria, an existing cellular network — augmented, in some rural areas, by specially designed antennas — should do the trick.
