THE world’s least sophisticated laptop computer was announced yesterday — and it runs by clockwork.

The machine, which will cost less than $100 (£56), is not aimed at the cutting edge of corporate calculation but instead is destined for the poor of the planet.

The inventor of the robust laptop hopes to distribute it to tens of millions of children throughout the developing world, helping to bridge the information gap between rich and poor.

One of its most useful features, the clockwork hand-crank, is based on the wind-up radio invented in Britain by Trevor Baylis more than a decade ago.

Nicholas Negroponte, chairman and co-founder of Massachusetts Institute of Technology Media Labs, believes that his cheap learning aid will be virtually indestructible. The idea came to him after he visited Cambodia and saw the effect that donated computers had on children.

He said he knew a low-cost laptop could be made, because at least half the retail price of commercial computers is spent on advertising. “We have none of that cost,” he said.

“The rest of it is the display — and we have a lot of expertise working to bring the cost of that down to $35.”

His non-profit One Laptop per Child group plans to have up to 15 million of them in production over the next year and believes as many as 150 million could be manufactured every year by 2007. If the computer becomes that successful, it will represent a threat to Microsoft, which does not use “open source” software.

A prototype of the silver laptop, which can be folded in several ways, will be ready in November and will be displayed at the world summit of the Information Society in Tunisia.

Professor Negroponte said that schoolchildren in Brazil, China, Egypt, Thailand and South Africa would be among the first to get the laptops. The Governor of Massachusetts, Mitt Romney, also plans to buy 500,000 of them for schools in the state.

The computer will connect to wireless internet networks. The screen will be able to switch from colour to monochrome to make it visible in bright sunlight.

“It’s the future, there’s no doubt about it,” Mr Baylis said yesterday. “Many years ago I went to Botswana and joined one of my wind-up radios, in holy matrimony as it were, with an Apple e-mate. We got it to run for 14 to 15 minutes. So this is old technology, in a strange way.”

Mr Baylis also invented a shoe that can recharge a mobile phone using energy from walking; but he abandoned the project after 9/11.

“Anyone with a battery in their shoe is now considered a shoe bomber,” he said.

Professor Negroponte said that his computer’s retractable crank can be used to generate about ten minutes of power for every minute of winding.

Sponsors of the project include Google, the online search engine, which is working on software that can link several computers to the same central “brain”. Although $100 is a breakthrough price for a laptop, Professor Negroponte is aware that it will still be out of reach for some nations.

Other organisations have developed cheap computers for Third World schoolchildren. The British charity Ndiyo invented a similarly inexpensive laptop called the Nivo, which also runs on open-source software. Another laptop, called the Simputer, was created for developing nations by Indian scientists.

“I’ve told the governments that our price will float and go down over time,” Professor Negroponte said. “$100 is still too expensive.”

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