Overshadowed by Sony’s release of Playstation this week — but more important news if the advance of technology in education is important to you — was the announcement that the One Laptop Per Child project had taken delivery of the first production run of these $100 laptops.

As reported on BoingBoing yesterday, the machine “is Linux-based, with a dual-mode display—both a full-color, transmissive DVD mode, and a second display option that is black and white reflective and sunlight-readable at 3× the resolution. The laptop has a 500MHz processor and 128MB of DRAM, with 500MB of Flash memory; it will not have a hard disk, but it will have four USB ports. The laptops will have wireless broadband that, among other things, allows them to work as a mesh network; each laptop will be able to talk to its nearest neighbors, creating an ad hoc, local area network. The laptops will use innovative power (including wind-up) and will be able to do most everything except store huge amounts of data.” Complete tech specs are available on the OLPC site here.

The OLPC project isn’t about CPU speed, however, it’s about making it possible to give every child access to computers and the Internet regardless of location or income. Predictably (since the OLPC B1 runs Linux, not Windows) Microsoft has weighed in and calls the MIT-led effort to put a computer in every child’s hands “a laughable addition to a mud hut.” But let’s not let Microsoft’s hubris rain on this parade. OLPC is a noble and essential effort to give students in developing nations — and potentially in the  underveloped neighborhoods of this nation — equal access to computer technology and the global community.