$100 COMPUTER
Students Help Design Laptop, Their Work Nets $500,000 from Real Networks

Childhood friends Michael Burns and Justin Gallardo have been tinkering with computers since they were young boys growing up in the small Oregon town of Keizer.

Soon, their stellar computer programming skills will reach around the Planet, touching millions of children who have never had access to a computer of any kind.

Burns, Gallardo, and fellow OSU students Sarah Cooley, Brad Morgan, and Josh Schonstal are working with the One Laptop Per Child (OLPC) program, an international nonprofit organization aiming to create laptops for underprivileged children that sell for less that $100.

The OSU students’ work has been so remarkable that RealNetworks, Inc., makers of RealPlayer, took notice and gave a $500,000 gift to the OSU Open Source Lab, where the students have been working on the project just across the hall from a climate controlled room that houses massive banks of servers.

Made of neon green and white plastic, the little, low-cost laptop looks more like a toy than a computer, but inside it’s packed with cutting edge technology designed by the open source community – including a word processing program and a media player the OSU students contributed. Nicknamed the “Green Machine” because of its color and small environmental footprint, the battery runs 12 hours on a full charge and is made of nickel metal hydride (NiMH), considered a non-hazardous waste. To manually charge the battery, there’s a string kids can pull.

The laptop’s technology is entirely open source, meaning that the computer programming codes for the software are easily accessible and can be modified or built upon by anyone, anywhere in the world.

“This is part of the laptop’s educational power,” Gallardo says. “Kids can look into the guts and figure out how things work and make changes. That’s how I started learning.”

North Krimsly, the software development manager of the OSU Open Source Lab, has nothing but praise for the students and their work. “They are truly remarkable,” he says. “They deserve all the credit. Their work is what impressed RealNetworks and led to the gift. They took the initiative on this project and ran with it. I just tried to stay out of their way. They’re amazing.”

When Burns first heard about the One Laptop Per Child program on CNN, he began asking technical questions through postings to various mailing lists. His questions and enthusiasm sparked interest from network engineers at MIT, where Nicholas Negroponte, co-founder of the MIT Media Lab, originally started the project.

“We got an email from one of the developers, who said, ‘I know you want to get involved, here’s my phone number.’ I was a sophomore in computer science, and here was this engineer on this big project over in Boston who wanted me to call,” Burns says. “My heart stopped for a minute or two.”

Burns made the phone call and said he wanted to work on the project. The engineer said the laptop was in need of a word processor that could open, create, and edit text documents. Burns and Gallardo thought that would be an interesting project, something that might take them four or five months. Later that day, they discovered there was hitch: the engineer needed the software in just five days, in time to give a demonstration to important dignitaries interested in the laptop.

So, fueled with “a lot of Red Bull” and working around the clock, Gallardo and Burns jumped into the project. When they came up for air a few days later, severely sleep-deprived, but smiling, they had succeeded.

“We did it!” Burns says. “We were just exhausted. But it worked for them, which is a pretty amazing feeling.”

Photo: OSU students (from left) Justin Gallardo, Michael Burns, Sarah Cooley, Josh Schonstal, and Brad Morgan (not pictured) show prototypes of the computers they’re helping develop in the OSU Open Source Lab on campus. The computers are part of the One Laptop Per Child (OLPC) program, an international nonprofit organization that wants to distribute inexpensive laptops that can be made for $100 to underprivileged children around the world.