As educators worldwide await the release of Nicholas Negroponte's $100 laptop and technology luminaries such as Bill Gates and others continue to predict a future dominated by affordable technologies destined to change the face of learning, a fledgling tech company says it has created a solution capable of delivering the benefits of a fully functional PC to every student--today.

The kicker: They can do it for less than $100 a student, says Stephen Dukker, chairman and CEO of nComputing, which manufactures a suite of products that promise to turn a single computer or server into an interconnected network of as many as 30 machines.

Rather than provide students with their own CPU, the technology operates similar to a thin-client solution, enabling users to do everything from create standard word-processing documents and spreadsheets to watch streaming video and use complex multimedia--all reportedly without compromising the speed and functionality of the other machines connected to the network.

So far, Dukker says, response from the education community to the product has been overwhelming. Though the product line wasn't officially launched until Sept. 25, he noted, the company already has shipped some 12,000 units to U.S. schools, with more than 100,000 going to customers in developing nations.

In a meeting with eSchool Newseditors in September, Dukker demonstrated how the company's NStation product works by connecting to a host computer and feeding off an existing CPU.

Resembling a standard memory card, the device can be installed inside an existing machine, where it branches out via standard Ethernet cables to a network of satellite keyboards and monitors, fueling the computing needs of up to seven users from the processing power of a single machine. If customers prefer not to load the cards inside existing CPUs (each card supports up to three users), nComputing also provides a version of the same card that comes housed in its own stand-alone box. Additional users then connect to the satellite box, which is linked to the host machine or server.

Unlike Negroponte's prototype device, which contains its own processor and operates as a scaled-down version of a traditional laptop computer, nComputing's device isn't a computer at all, explains Dukker.

Not unlike the human brain, Dukker says, most personal computers use only a very small portion of their overall processing power when in use.

Rather than up production costs by purchasing expensive processors from leading chip makers such as Intel and AMD, he said, the company found it could drastically reduce its costs to users by designing a device that simply borrowed its processing power from existing PCs. The finished product has no operating system, runs zero software applications, and uses about as much energy as a household light bulb; but, when paired with a another machine, Dukker says, it provides users with a near-seamless computing experience, limited only by the output of its host.