Photos: $100 laptop takes world stage

At a world Internet summit in Tunisia, MIT Media Lab Chairman Nicholas Negroponte (front) and Alan Kay (rear, seated), a laptop visionary in the 1970s while at Xerox PARC and now part of the $100 laptop project, announced details of a computer intended for children in poorer nations. It uses a wind-up crank, a 500MHz processor, 1GB of memory and a variant of the Linux operating system.

United Nations Secretary-General Kofi Annan (left) and MIT's Negroponte (right) discuss the $100 laptop designed for children in developing countries.

The yellow and green case gives the machine a playful quality, MIT's Negroponte said.

The device can be converted for use as an e-book reader.