OLPC's $100 laptop was going to change the world

It was supposed to be the laptop that saved the world.In late 2005, tech visionary and MIT Media Lab founder Nicholas Negroponte pulled the cloth cover off a small green computer with a bright yellow crank. The device was the first working prototype for Negroponte's new nonprofit One Laptop Per Child, dubbed "the green machine" or simply "the $100 laptop". And it was like nothing that Negroponte's audience - at either his panel at a UN-sponsored tech summit in Tunis, or around the globe - had ever seen.The OLPC was all the rage and hype for a few years back then, but it never materialised. Still, while not nearly the same thing, cheap mobile phones and smartphones have played a somewhat similar role.