Low-Cost Computers for the People

From a communications-saturated vantage point here in North America, sometimes it’s easy to forget that the majority of the world’s population has never made a telephone call, let alone used the Internet. In many developing countries, the very cost of a computer can amount to more than the average worker’s annual salary. In an attempt to surmount the prohibitive cost of this increasingly essential piece of IT hardware, researchers in the developing world have begun to take matters into their own hands by designing low-cost computers that address the particular needs of their nations’ more disadvantaged populations.