When the One Laptop Per Child (OLPC) first started, they had an incredibly innovative idea: create cheap laptops for children in developing countries. Unfortunately, the program hit to major stumbling blocks: First, the laptop they came out with cost twice as much as had been planned. Second, everyone else started making cheap laptops, too.

The One Laptop Per Child (OLPC) project and Microsoft Corp. are working together to develop a dual-boot system to put both Linux and Windows on laptops aimed at kids in developing countries, the head of OLPC said in an interview Tuesday.

$100 for a laptop for a child in the poorest countries is still too much for Nicholas Negroponte. The founder of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology Media Lab, and founder and current chairman of the One Laptop per Child project (OLPC) wants to give portable computers to all the children in developing countries.

Thank you for your interest in One Laptop Per Child. Our mission is to provide a means for learning, self-expression and exploration to the nearly two billion children of the developing world with little or no access to education. While children are by nature eager for knowledge, many countries have little resources to devote to education—sometimes less than $20 a year per child.

"The One Laptop Per Child (OLPC) project, aimed at providing an educational computer for developing countries at a cost of $100, has begun production of hardware. The first mass produced laptops are due to come out in October this year"

As One Laptop Per Child prepares to ship its highly anticipated XO laptops in two weeks, it is developing a "supercharger," a mass battery recharger that will draw power from cows and yo-yos to help the laptops run longer. (Australian Joel Stanley is working on the charger system for the XO-1 laptop, read his story here).

Walter Bender, the One Laptop Per Child program's director of software, told DesktopLinux.com on July 13 that he invites Dell Computer founder and CEO Michael Dell to help figure out how to better use 125 million computers that are discarded annually because they are archaic.

"China should be an obvious beneficiary of the One Laptop Per Child (OLPC) Scheme, which seeks to provide robust $100 portable Internet computers to children in developing countries."

Five years after the concept was first proposed, the so-called $100 laptop is poised to go into mass production.

Hardware suppliers have been given the green light to ramp-up production of all of the components needed to build millions of the low-cost machines.