Steve Wozniak: $100 laptop deserves a Nobel Prize

Apple co-founder Steve Wozniak has revealed he's a big fan of Nicholas Negroponte's One Laptop Per Child (OLPC) project but confessed that his own plans to switch entirely to the device have gone awry.

Speaking today at the Broadband and Beyond conference in Sydney, Wozniak told delegates that despite early doubts, he believes that overall the project is making a positive contribution to developing economies.

"At first, I had questions about why would you bring computers out to villages where you had to crank it for power -- where you don't have power, where you don't have the Internet," he said.

"But you really need the Internet to have access to the encyclopaedias of the world."

Wozniak's comments come days after Microsoft founder Bill Gates said that cheap computers will not help the poor.

"Certainly computing is great," said Gates, adding that cheaper computers do help ... but "when you're looking at the poorest ... a computer is not their most urgent need."

Wozniak added that he believed OLPC founder Nicholas Negroponte deserved international recognition for his work.

"I think he deserves a Nobel Peace Prize," he said.

Wozniak told the conference that he was impressed by the way the OLPC project is opening up new employment opportunities for villages in developing countries, citing the example of a village in Rwanda which is using the OLPC's XO laptops to enable locals to act as outsourced software developers.

"I hope [the One Laptop per Child project] goes far, I'm a big fan," he said today.

Wozniak said he has his own XO laptop, which he had initially intended to use as his sole PC. "I had the intention to switch over ... and carry it everywhere but I didn't make it that far."

Back in 2005, The Wall Street Journal reported that Apple founder Steve Jobs had approached the OLPC Foundation with an offer of a free copy of Mac OS X for each of the devices, but was turned down on the grounds that the software was not open source.