Choate Alum Negroponte ’61 Dreams of Giving Laptops to Every Poor Person
By Luke Min ‘10
News Reporter
For several years, Choate alum Nicholas Negroponte ’61 has been providing free laptops to Third World countries through the One Laptop Per Child Association (OLPC), a non-profit organization that he founded and currently chairs. These laptops are spill-proof, can access wireless internet, and come equipped with microphones, game-pad controllers, rotating screens, and keyboards labeled with Amharic, an Ethiopian language that had never before been laid out for a keyboard.
Born in 1943, Mr. Negroponte graduated from Choate in 1961. Although he dreamed of going to Paris to become a sculptor, his father pushed him to enroll at MIT. “I decided that if I was good in art and I was good at mathematics, I would study architecture, which was the blending of the two,” said Mr. Negroponte at the EG conference (European Association for Computer Graphics). He studied architecture in undergraduate and graduate school. After earning a Master’s degree in architecture in 1966, he joined the MIT faculty in the same year. In 1967, he founded MIT’s Architecture Machine Group, and in 1985 started the MIT Media Lab with Jerome B.Wiesner. He was the director of the Media Lab until 2000.
In 2003, Mr. Negroponte and other Media Lab scientists founded the One Laptop Per Child Project. OLPC’s mission is “to eliminate poverty and create world peace by providing education.” The OLPC’s current laptop design, XO-1, is called the “$100 Laptop” or “Children’s Machine.” Multiple organizations, such as Advanced Micro Devices (AMD), Brightstar Corporation, eBay, Google, Marvell, News Corporation SES, Nortel Networks, and Red Hat have sponsored OLPC by donating a total $2 million to date. The organization is controversial: some believe that other necessities should be provided to the unprivileged before laptops. “Take the word ‘laptop’ and substitute the word ‘education,’ and nobody would say that [it is not a necessity],” said Negroponte in an interview. “This is probably the only hope… if I really have to look at sort of how to eliminate poverty and create peace and work on the environment, I can’t think of a better way to do it.”
Others applaud Negroponte’s efforts. David Pogue raves about the XO laptop in The New York Times: “The truth is, the XO laptop, now in final testing, is absolutely amazing… both the hardware and the software exhibit breakthrough after breakthrough.”
Between November 2007 and July 2008, the project shipped almost 400,000 laptops, according to its Web site, www.laptopgiving.org. Most recently, it provided 100,000 laptops to children in Uruguay.
“It’s not a laptop project,” said Mr. Negroponte. “It’s an education project.”
