a year, Negroponte expects his nonprofit One Laptop Per Child to get 5 million to 15 million of the machines into production, when in Brazil, China, Egypt, Thailand, South Africa are due to begin them.

In the year — when Massachusetts Governor Mitt Romney hopes to start buying them for all 500,000 middle and high-school students in his state — Negroponte 100 million to 150 million made. (He boasts that these humble $100 notebooks would the world's existing annual production of laptops, is about 50 million.)

While a prototype isn't to be shown off until November, Negroponte unveiled blueprints at Technology Review magazine's Emerging Technologies conference at MIT.

Among the specs: A 500-megahertz processor (that was fast in the 1990s but slow by today's standards) by Advanced Micro Devices Inc. and flash memory of a hard drive with moving . To save on software , the laptops would run the freely-available Linux operating system instead of Windows. the defining difference is the hand crank, though first-generation users would get no more than 10 of juice from one minute of winding.