A plan to educate the children of the world is rapidly materialising into a multi-billion dollar segment of the PC industry.

The One Laptop Per Child (OLPC) project shipped several hundred test units in November to countries around the world, including Brazil, Libya and Nigeria.

In 2007 the project expects to ship between five million and 10 million of the computers. At an estimated sale price of $140-150 per unit, the project is poised to approach $1bn in revenues in its first year alone.  

The OLPC features a 366MHz AMD processor, 128Mb of Ram and 512Mb of Flash memory storage. Prices are expected to drop over time as components become cheaper. A single unit by 2010 is expected to costs a mere $50.

The project has made impressive strides since OLPC chairman Nicholas Negroponte first launched it in January 2005.

The design team did not just set out to engineer a notebook computer that would cost about $100, they also had to create new computer design that would meet the environmental and practical limitations in developing nations.

The device offers a newly designed dual-mode screen that allows users to operate the computer in direct sunlight using a monochrome mode and in the dark with a backlit full colour mode.

To cope with the limited and intermittent power supply in rural areas, designers set out to create a yo-yo like power generator that children can use to charge the battery.

Internet connectivity will be delivered through a Wi-Fi mesh network that relays the signal back to a base station at the school which has a satellite connection.

The unit will be running an adapted version of Red Hat's Fedora Linux distribution. This could propel market share for Linux on the desktop as high as 12 per cent, Negroponte has projected.

Months later Negroponte disclosed that he had provided Microsoft with a number of test units, allowing the company to try and install Windows on them.

The project also met its share of setbacks. India questioned the basic premise that providing notebook computers to children would, by default, improve their education.

The nation's Ministry of Human Resource Development labelled the $100 laptop project as "pedagogically suspect" and discontinued its planned investment.