The government of Portugal has committed to buying 500,000 Intel Classmate PCs for school children throughout the country - seven months after the company dropped its support for the One Laptop Per Child (OLPC) initiative.

The Classmate PCs will be handed out as part of Portugal's year-old e-School project, which provides notebooks and Internet access to teachers and students, and the country's larger Magellan Initiative technology plan.

"By equipping our schools with state-of-the-art computing technology and Internet connectivity, we hope to hasten the transition to economic models that benefit our citizens," Portuguese Prime Minister José Sócrates said in a statement.

The goal of the Magellan Initiative is to provide school children with personal PCs through Portugal's Ministry of Public Works, Transportation and Communications. Intel will serve as the government's technology adviser for the Magellan Initiative, as it did with e-School.

Intel has been working with the Portuguese government since November 2007, when it launched skool.pt, a Web-based resource for high school students in math, biology, physics and chemistry. It now has more than 60,000 registered visitors.

Earlier this year, Intel dropped its support for the OLPC program, which has a similar goal of providing cheap laptops to school-aged children in developing countries. During the six months, it was a part of OLPC, Intel contributed $100 million, but at the time of their departure, OLPC president Walter Bender said that "we never really got much going with Intel to have an impact."

Intel later released its second-generation Classmate PC in April 2008.

Intel and its Classmate PC has had a rocky history with OLPC. Intel's chairman, Craig Barrett, publicly disparaged Negroponte's OLPC program when it was first announced, saying that Negroponte should call his program's XO laptop a "$100 gadget," and not a computer. The company later reversed course and joined OLPC in July 2007, but their happy marriage didn't last long.