The nonprofit organization One Laptop per Child (OLPC) has a mission that is easy to articulate but very challenging to achieve: Provide laptop computers to the almost 2 billion children who live in parts of the world where poverty and the lack of a structured educational system deprive them of an adequate education. To further complicate the goal, OLPC announced, in 2005, the intent to design, manufacture, and distribute its notebook XO computer, built from the ground up, at a cost of only $100 per unit. The founder and chairman of OLPC is Nicholas Negroponte, a Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) professor, co-founder of the MIT Media Laboratory, author of "Being Digital," and famous for his many contributions to the continually expanding digital world. Negroponte brought important players in corporate America on board, and OLPC's dream of building the XO computer is now a reality. The Beta-4, the fourth iteration of an entirely new type of computer, has started to roll off the assembly line ready for distribution. Though it failed to meet the $100 per unit goal, OLPC's $188 machine is an amazing piece of hardware and software engineering.