After years of brainstorming, tinkering, and flesh-pressing, Nicholas Negroponte’s One Laptop Per Child project is finally mass-producing machines, the Associated Press reports.
A company called Quanta Computer Inc. is manufacturing the laptops on a Chinese assembly line. Project officials plan on sending the computers off soon to schoolchildren in Uruguay, Peru, and Mongolia — and to American and Canadian consumers who buy machines through the project’s “Give 1 Get 1” promotion.
Mr. Negroponte said this summer that he hoped to produce one million machines a month by the start of 2008. It’s unclear whether he’ll meet that goal — mass production has started a bit later than he had anticipated — but the news that some students should receive low-cost laptops this month will surely hearten the project’s sponsors. —Brock Read
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