
OLPC’s $100 laptop was going to change the world (2018) - zer0tonin
https://www.theverge.com/2018/4/16/17233946/olpcs-100-laptop-education-where-is-it-now
======
diegof79
I live in Argentina. The OLPC came to Argentina to promote the project, at the
same time as Uruguay our neighbors. The pressure from Intel/Microsoft to no
adopt it was incredible.

In record time there were cheap netbooks pre-installed with a reduced version
of Windows including Office. They did lot of lobby, and while Uruguay choose
the OLPC... Argentina went with the Wintel netbooks.

I think that the project failed because it ignored the political aspects of
the education system. The $100 laptop was a distraction. A fundamental aspect
of the project was to rethink education in relationship with technology. But
if you learn a little bit about the history of education in each country,
you’ll see that education is closely related with politics (e.g. the Catholic
Church had a lot of influence in Latin America the education system). While
technology is an important driver for change, if you want to change the
education system including how teachers teach... technology alone is not
enough. Sadly companies like Microsoft and Intel understood that it was easy
to convince corrupt politicians to buy the machines without a substantial
change of the status quo: win-win for the companies and policy makers, but a
loss for the future of children.

~~~
coob
> A fundamental aspect of the project was to rethink education in relationship
> with technology.

Disclaimer: I worked on early software for the OLPC (had an original dev
board) for a group that (long after I left) went on to win the Global Learning
X-Prize [1].

I actually think the issue with the OLPC not achieving its goals is that they
focused too much on the hardware and not what software was on the device and
the learning outcomes the software delivered for children. The classic "here's
some tech go figure out what to do with it" approach doesn't work. There was
more interest in teaching to code and open software rather than basic numeracy
and literacy. Content is king here.

That's why initiatives like those of the winners of the Global Learning
X-Prize[1] have shown measurable impact on learning outcomes.

[1] [https://www.xprize.org/prizes/global-
learning](https://www.xprize.org/prizes/global-learning)

~~~
inimino
I disagree. Access to understandable technology is more important than
content. These are not mere content delivery devices. Unfortunately, decision
makers are poorly informed, and people are lazy, and prefer something already
polished over a box of pointy tools.

~~~
schoen
Seems like there was a perennial disagreement (which is continuing today)
about the degree to which OLPC was meant to help teach _computing_ , or a
_curriculum_ , or just give students and teachers some tools to do parts of
what they were doing anyway in a higher-tech way.

Edit: I particularly appreciate bryanwb's comments on autodidacticism at
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21047351](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21047351),
which point at a fourth possibility: the idea that just having access to
computers is good for kids.

~~~
inimino
Yes, this is true. I don't mean to say better software wouldn't have helped--I
think OLPC was killed by a combination of factors. (Not least the early
trajectory of its hype cycle.) But better software _alone_ ... I don't think
it would have materially changed the outcome in any way.

------
bryanwb
I worked on the one laptop per child project for three years of my life. I co-
founded olpc Nepal and its succeeding organization OLE Nepal together with
rabi karmacharya who is referenced in the article. I was also co editor of
olpc news for a time. It was a great experience if not altogether successful.
The most problematic aspect of olpc IMHO was that it was dominated by male
autodidacts who looked down on professional educators. Ole Nepal from the very
beginning worked very closely with Nepali educators.

Rabi continues to do great work and I am rooting for him. You can find out
more about OLE Nepal here [http://www.olenepal.org/](http://www.olenepal.org/)

~~~
ivanmilles
Can you say more about the autodidacts and the conflict with professional
staff? I'm interested in specific areas that were problematic, and if you have
any learnings from mitigating it.

~~~
bryanwb
Olpc leadership saw government education bodies and curriculum groups as
potential road blocks best avoided. This is with some reason as it can take
years to work through then. That said, they can't be advoided in my experience
if you expect to have any impact. They also disregarded the concerns of every
day teachers because they presumed every kid could be an autodidact just like
them once they had the magic laptop.

It all stems from Seymour papert's original vision that inspired olpc. This
theory is called constructionism and held that children can develop knowledge
of the world through experiential learning. They can "construct" their own
knowledge. Unfortunately, the role that a teacher might need to pay on this
process was often underestimated.

To counteract this, we engaged the most creative Nepali teachers (of which the
re are a large number) to create educational activities that aligned with the
nationial curriculum and addressed content areas where nationally Nepali kids
were struggling.

~~~
ivanmilles
>every kid could be an autodidact just like them once they had the magic
laptop

So, if I understand you correctly, OLPC went in with a constructionist
perspective and it didn't work out? This is hyper-relevant to what I'm working
on, so: did a proper theoretical constructionist framework fail you, or was
underestimating the role of teachers the main problem?

Did engaging Nepali teachers give any insights in the above?

~~~
nnq
> went in with a constructionist perspective and it didn't work out

I have no knowledge of OLPC, but it seems _obvious to me:_ successfull
autodidacts in societies where self-directed-learning is not commont (probably
most societies...) tend to be _internally_ motivated, so higher proportion of
them are introverts, also higher proportions have at least little bit of
aspergers-like traits etc. Extroverts on the other hand tend to learn _most
from human teachers they physically interact with!_

If you'd crunch the numbers and compare them with the personality traits of _"
influencers"_, you'll likely see they are opposite. So any chance that a
positive view of the device will spread via word of mouth is low, aka any
change of whatever the equivalent of "going viral" would be amongst African
villages is _low!_

By targeting the self-learners you're basically _going anti-viral_... you're
doing _anti-marketing!_ You'd need to _try and hit the "micro-influencers"_,
and probably only chance of that is by hitting teachers and some community
leaders and local "celebrities".

We techo-focused hyper-individualistic self-learners only thrive in societies
_after_ they've been properly wired up both socially and technically. Drop us
in a borderline-medieval society and we're useless and have zero influence on
the people around us. Heck, "geeks" started to thrive in medieval Europe after
the church managed in a primitive way to network part of the world. Probably
similar patterns happened in China and the Arab world too. Most
_underdeveloped societies_ today _totally lack that kind of useful networking_
...otherwise they likely wouldn't be underdeveloped in the first place!

~~~
tudelo
internal motivation == introvert == aspergers? got some stats on that?

~~~
nnq
no == there, not that strong of a claim, just "if [A], then more likely [B]
than without prior [A]" ...if you have endless time (or a few PhD students you
can task to research literature for free) and patience search for studies
about "associations between [A] and [B]" dig and dig through things.

I avoid making a stronger claims bc it would require too much work to research
it, do it yourself if you want do (dis)confirm, I'm just "throwing a bone
here", too lazy to think or research more about it :)...

~~~
tudelo
Ahh, so you are making these claims because you think they are true. You
presented them as some sort of fact by stating that this is obvious to you. I
just don't really get why it was relevant to lay out that chain of relevance.
I don't see the obvious connection between self motivated and introvert, but I
guess it could be possible. The other connections just seem like random
thoughts. I was trying to figure out why something so obvious to you doesn't
explain itself when presented without evidence...

------
senko
I'd say OLPC did change the world in a myriad small ways, just not in the big
lofty way they imagined.

As other commenters mentioned, it was a direct inspiration for Asus eee PC,
which spawned an entire category of netbooks and ultrabooks. I wouldn't be
surprised if indirectly it also was a part of inspiration for iPads and
Android tablets by letting Apple and others realise there's a strong demand
for sub-notebook consumer "computers".

As another commenter mentioned, Raspberry Pi was also in part
influenced/inspired by OLPC.

And on a personal note: around 9 years ago I was working on (porting some
Linux software to) a touchscreen-capable netbook directly inspired by OLPC. In
my spare time, frustrated by the lack of touchscreen-friendly drawing apps I
built a small web app to scratch my itch. Several years later, it's used by
hundreds of thousands of people worldwide, many of them teachers and kids in
elementary schools.

I wouldn't be surprised if there are a lot of people out there with similar
stories to tell.

~~~
MisterTea
> As other commenters mentioned, it was a direct inspiration for Asus eee PC,
> which spawned an entire category of netbooks and ultrabooks.

I'd say they were late to the table with a sub notebook design as Toshiba
released the Libretto in 1996. Then there were those weird Windows CE mini
laptop organizers in the 90's as well. Sharp Wizard, etc.

~~~
zozbot234
Wasn't the Toshiba Libretto more like a $2000 laptop? <g> With the Windows CE
'organizers' not _that_ far behind? Sure, hardware was a lot more costly back
in the 1990s, but still. (And how could you forget to mention the Palm
NetBook?)

------
jgrahamc
I own one of these. I bought it through the "Give One, Get One" program that
OLPC ran
([https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/One_Laptop_per_Child#Give_1_Ge...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/One_Laptop_per_Child#Give_1_Get_1_program)).

If you've never used one it's hard to describe just how awful this machine
was. The keyboard, the screen, the processor and worst of all the software.
And I say that as someone who really wanted it to work and really wanted to
use it with children to help them understand computing.

~~~
lukego
I loved my XO. I used it for writing Forth code to relive the BASIC hacking of
my youth. Great in that niche :-)

I don't think I ever had fun with it after booting Linux though...

~~~
DonHopkins
That's Mitch Bradley's Open Firmware Forth, which was also on Suns, post-NuBus
PowerPC Macs, Pegasos, and IBM Power Systems!

I used to call it "L1-A Forth", because that's the Forth you got when you
pressed "L1-A" on a Sun keyboard to get into the boot monitor. He also made a
great version of that Forth system with a metacompiler that ran under Unix
(Forthmacs), which I used a lot.

[https://github.com/MitchBradley](https://github.com/MitchBradley)

[https://github.com/MitchBradley/openfirmware](https://github.com/MitchBradley/openfirmware)

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Open_Firmware](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Open_Firmware)

[https://elinux.org/Flameman/openfirmware-
apple](https://elinux.org/Flameman/openfirmware-apple)

[http://macos9lives.com/smforum/index.php?topic=1965.0](http://macos9lives.com/smforum/index.php?topic=1965.0)

[https://github.com/ForthHub/ForthFreak/blob/master/Forthmacs](https://github.com/ForthHub/ForthFreak/blob/master/Forthmacs)

------
bArray
I think the biggest failure (ignoring politics, markets, etc) was its
complexity. Tech with moving parts tends to break. You also can't easily build
something that is all things to all people, it's better to do a simple thing
well than a lot of things awfully.

If I were to set out with this challenge today, I would build a basic version
of the Pi Top [1]. Literally just a keyboard, touch screen, Raspberry Pi,
battery and battery circuit (input 5-24V DC, output 5V DC). A lot of people in
hard-up areas still have phones and therefore some kind of DC power, but worse
case a car battery can usually be come across.

Put the Pi behind the display (avoid bending the display cable) and expose the
inputs/outputs. Put the battery in the keyboard area to weight it down. Have
everything just plug into normal ports (including the display) with visible
cables on the back.

That way it's simple, easy(ier) to fix and upgrade. Parts can be hacked and
re-used for other projects. There's tonnes of documentation and online
support. People could feasibly take to broken devices to create a working one.

As for the meshing stuff, it's overly complicated. I think you would just
preload the machine with a bunch of learning resources (software, books, etc)
and make it easy for the device to become a hotspot for file sharing.

[1] [https://accounts.pi-top.com/products/pi-top/](https://accounts.pi-
top.com/products/pi-top/)

~~~
avhon1
What you've described is nearly exactly the design of the OLPC. A one-piece
impermeable keyboard, battery behind the keyboard to weight it down, all of
the sophisticated electronics behind the screen to minimize cable bending.

The charging circuitry will charge the battery if given anywhere between 11
and 18 volts (there are user reports of slowly charging with 9V), and will not
be damaged if exposed to higher, or negative, voltage. I've charged mine from
my 12V lithium motorcycle battery plenty of times.

The OLPC XO-1 is quite easy to disassemble and repair. You only need one
philips #1 screwdriver, and it doesn't have a ridiculous number of teeny-tiny
screws, or any glue, holding it together. The wiki has detailed instructions
on disassembling the top[0] and bottom[1] of the laptop, and also guides on
replacing specific components.

People took advantage of the easy-to-disassemble and thoroughly-documented
hardware to develop community hacks. A popular one was to replace the membrane
keyboard with a particular USB keyboard, which could be cut up to fit the
chassis, and internally wired to one of the USB ports. I've seen a tutorial on
how to solder an extra 256 MB of memory in.

The G1G1 laptops came with a preinstalled collection[3] of educational
material, mostly from Wikipedia. The wiki has instructions on how to create
custom collections to be distributed with a deployment of laptops. OLPC also
created the School Server[4], a distro intended to provide a central network
resource for communication and stored learning material.

[0]
[http://wiki.laptop.org/go/Disassembly_top](http://wiki.laptop.org/go/Disassembly_top)

[1]
[http://wiki.laptop.org/go/Disassembly_bottom](http://wiki.laptop.org/go/Disassembly_bottom)

[3]
[http://wiki.laptop.org/go/Collections#G1G1](http://wiki.laptop.org/go/Collections#G1G1)

[4]
[http://wiki.laptop.org/go/School_server](http://wiki.laptop.org/go/School_server)

~~~
bArray
Firstly, thank you for taking the time to reply. In your opinion, specifically
regarding the hardware, do you believe there are improvements that could be
made (in terms of design)?

> What you've described is nearly exactly the design of the

> OLPC. A one-piece impermeable keyboard, battery behind the

> keyboard to weight it down, all of the sophisticated

> electronics behind the screen to minimize cable bending.

Kind of, but it has speakers, daughter extension boards, swivel display,
custom "motherboard" PCB, etc. I do appreciate that it was a different time
though and I have the arm chair privilege of looking at this through a modern
lens.

> The charging circuitry will charge the battery if given

> anywhere between 11 and 18 volts (there are user reports

> of slowly charging with 9V), and will not be damaged if

> exposed to higher, or negative, voltage. I've charged mine

> from my 12V lithium motorcycle battery plenty of times.

These days (modern lens) I think it would be appropriate to accept an input
down to 5V (i.e. USB). Supporting AC wouldn't be incredibly difficult either
(many phone wall changes are quite small), but of course would increase size
and/or complexity. Also I think it's good to keep kids away from high
voltage/current AC.

> The OLPC XO-1 is quite easy to disassemble and repair. You

> only need one philips #1 screwdriver, and it doesn't have

> a ridiculous number of teeny-tiny screws, or any glue,

> holding it together. The wiki has detailed instructions on

> disassembling the top[0] and bottom[1] of the laptop, and

> also guides on replacing specific components.

It's certainly much better than I thought in terms of repair-ability, but I
still believe it's overly complex. The display for example should get a
display signal via a HDMI cable (which is shielded) and send the touchscreen
data via USB, as well as providing power for the display. If the cable breaks,
sourcing a replacement is relatively easy given the standardization. If the
display breaks, an external one may be used.

> People took advantage of the easy-to-disassemble and

> thoroughly-documented hardware to develop community hacks.

> A popular one was to replace the membrane keyboard with a

> particular USB keyboard, which could be cut up to fit the

> chassis, and internally wired to one of the USB ports.

> I've seen a tutorial on how to solder an extra 256 MB of

> memory in.

That's awesome, but it should have come with an off-the-shelf drop-in
removable USB keyboard anyway. The keyboard should be a valuable item, even if
the rest of the laptop is completely destroyed.

> The G1G1 laptops came with a preinstalled collection[3] of

> educational material, mostly from Wikipedia. The wiki has

> instructions on how to create custom collections to be

> distributed with a deployment of laptops. OLPC also

> created the School Server[4], a distro intended to provide

> a central network resource for communication and stored

> learning material.

The preinstalled collections are pretty cool. The school server I highly doubt
would have worked correctly in many cases as it relies on too much to work
correctly (server setup correctly, networking, stable electricity supply,
etc).

These days I would make all the books stand-alone, probably distributed as
markdown as you can read them raw or compile them into some more pleasing
format. I think requiring some non-standard program to open .xol files was
probably a move in the wrong direction.

------
dragonsh
In my view humans built on top of failures as much as on success. I see
following things which were propelled by OLPC:

1\. No frills cheap laptops like EeePC, I don’t think computer manufacturers
would have tried cheap laptop if its not for OLPC.

2\. Rise of google chromebooks which are the results of number 1. And today
are considered better than a tablet as a device which helps creativity among
kids not just consumption.

3\. Focus on educational content more than the technical details of a device.
This we learned only through the failure of hardware centric approach and I
believe it works for both developing and developed world students.

Hopefully we can learn from OLPC and build new initiatives with focus on good
content along with device today. Also can introduce kits using micro-bit, and
rPi like SBC with physical projects where student can deploy all 5 senses to
create and learn new things.

------
bane
I think the importance of the OLPC was that it showed that a general computing
device _could_ be assembled for a BOM of around $100. It was an extraordinary
challenge that tackled the growing concerns around the "digital divide". It
didn't succeed and that's okay, because it reset expectations of what cheap
general computing could be -- tolerable and good enough. It definitely paved
the way for later experiments like netbooks and the rPi.

I think one of the very overlooked experimental parts of the OLPC was the
innovative attempts to finance it via the buy-1-get-1 project. I think that
was also an experimental failure as well, but showed there was a demand among
techies for cheapo computing devices they could tinker with.

The Raspberry Pi project seems to have learned a ton of hard lessons from both
OLPC and the UK's previous dives into educational computing in the 80s,
synthesized them and become wildly and unexpectedly successful. Which drives
to the point that maybe the OLPC would have been more successful had it just
been generally available on the market at say $110 per unit.

For point of reference. The Raspberry Pi Zero has better compute specs than
the original OLPC did for $5. I wonder what kind of "laptop" could be
assembled for a BOM of say...$35?

~~~
duskwuff
> The Raspberry Pi Zero has better compute specs than the original OLPC did
> for $5. I wonder what kind of "laptop" could be assembled for a BOM of
> say...$35?

It'd be hard to get a usable display, keyboard, battery, and power supply at
that price point. The Pi Zero neatly bypasses all four of these issues by
having the user provide their own. :)

------
DonHopkins
>Bender thinks OLPC might have struck more deals if it had focused less on
technical efficiency. “Every conversation we ever had with any head of state —
every time — they said, ‘Can we build the laptop in our country?’” he says.
“We knew that by making the laptop in Shanghai, we could build the laptop [to
be] much less expensive. And what we didn’t realize was that the price wasn’t
what they were asking us about. They were asking us about pride, not price.
They were asking us about control and ownership of the project.” OLPC had
created a computer that could withstand dust and drops, but it hadn’t
accounted for political messiness.

One Laptop Factory Per Country.

~~~
em-bee
which is rather ironic because Free Software and Open Hardware Designs are all
about control by the users. the specs and everything was there, so letting
countries build their own would easily have been doable (ignoring what the
country needs to do to implement that). having a dozen countries build their
own could have had some interesting effects.

------
m4r35n357
Real reason is buried in the text:

"While Sugar was an elegant operating system, some potential buyers were
dubious of anything that wasn’t Microsoft Windows. They wanted students to
learn an interface they’d be using for the rest of their lives, not just with
the XO-1."

They bottled out of Linux, so no free OS . . . the rest is history.

~~~
dvfjsdhgfv
> They wanted students to learn an interface they’d be using for the rest of
> their lives

Somehow this just sounds very sad to me.

~~~
gt2
And silly because UI paradigms change anyways. And people are capable of
keeping up.

~~~
AnIdiotOnTheNet
True, but in my experience having worked for a school district and for a tech
college, there is nothing teachers hate more in the entire world than having
to revise curriculum. At the tech college, the IT instructors rewrote their
curriculum every year out of necessity, but instructors in other areas were
just like pretty much all the school district teachers I knew: if a button
changed position they were upset because they'd have to revise their
instructions that tell kids to click on the 'the third button from the left'
or some such nonsense.

~~~
fragmede
At overly busy tech startups where time is money, it's more than just the
"hassle", it's time that takes out from doing other work. There must be
screenshot automation suites out there, but the education department is often
woefully understaffed, under budgeted, and near last on the list of priorities
that it is a laborious, toilsome, and thankless task, often without
notification to the eduction team, which results in less-than professional
presentation when the first time the change is noticed is in the classroom or
when a customer complains. It's no wonder that it's upsetting when things are
changed!

------
onyva
"...it compromised its commitment to open source software, partnering with
Microsoft to put Windows on the XO-1." apropos
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21045765](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21045765)

------
antongribok
I was struck by this paragraph:

"Bender began to worry that people saw the project as a hardware startup, not
an educational initiative"

I couldn't help but think of the Raspberry Pi Foundation, and how it has been
successful with this regard.

~~~
pjc50
Eben Upton was partially inspired by the failures of the OLPC project - he
could see how it was indulging all sorts of tech whims and reinventing
everything possible, rather than providing an effective solution using proven
tech.

------
GnarfGnarf
That's too bad. I bought an XO through the "Give One, Get One" program. It was
a great device for kids to learn with. It had built-in microphone, speakers,
camera. You could display a sound wave like an oscilloscope.

One subtle point that is difficult to convey is that the OS was highly
optimized for power consumption. It would suspend execution in micro-
increments to prolong battery life. That's important if you have to manually
crank a generator or pedal a bike to make power.

Those kinds of features are not available in the laptops used by developed
countries.

------
cptskippy
> you probably remember the hand crank. ... Designers dropped the feature
> almost immediately ... because the winding process ... demanded energy that
> kids in very poor areas couldn’t spare.

Maybe something other than a $100 would be more life changing and improving if
you're circumstances are such that winding a crank is too much.

~~~
whywhywhywhy
Think it's more likely that it broke off the second you tried to use it and
the motion wasn't enough to charge it anyway.

Think the written excuse is the PR excuse.

------
nostrademons
It did change the world. The OLPC project launched the netbook industry -
before OLPC, cheap laptops cost ~$1000, afterwards you could get them for
$400. Now you can get cheap netbooks/tablets with a lot more functionality
than the XO for under $100.

It's just that it's not specifically the _OLPC 's_ laptop that changed the
world.

I think that what went wrong was a complete ignorance of market mechanisms.
Visionary head of a non-profit organism says he's going to benefit humanity by
providing cheap computers for kids in the developing world. He's right about
the supply chain, and completely wrong about the market, and the response of
the other players.

I remember when the OLPC came out there were reports that the first thing
recipients were doing was going on E-Bay to sell the computer they'd just
received and buy food. OLPC tried to quash the secondary market with the "buy
one, give one" program. They succeeded in creating a Western market for cheap
notebooks. Other manufacturers (Asus, etc.) succeeded in delivering better
machines for that market, which is unsurprising given their manufacturing
expertise. Once those better machines existed, the initial target market
bought them instead.

They succeeded in breaking the cartel that was keeping laptop prices > $1000,
which I've got to give them credit for. Much of the rest of the story is just
hubris in thinking they could deliver a better machine than companies that had
spent decades optimizing their manufacturing and quality control processes.

(There is perhaps a similar story in Tesla, which succeeded in getting
everybody to pay attention to electric cars, but will likely fail to maintain
its position within the changed market.)

------
aaron695
Shooting fish in a barrel but -

In the first world -

Computers are not generally useful for a classroom

To try and be useful you must also have significant education for teachers and
have significant maintenance budget.

We know the "Sugata Mitra’s famous Hole-In-The-Wall" failed, and we knew that
years ago.

Turning down Windows and Mac support which rich people use is insulting.

The concept people would steal the OLPC (The reason for the color) is dumb,
but unstoppable anyway, so the fact for years they wouldn't sell OLPC's to
developers and hobbyists because of this imaginary blackmarket, shows the lack
of thought and also the total arrogance to pretend it was "open".

It was well known at the time it came out people in the communities needed
mobiles phones and radios. But it just wasn't sexy enough for NGO's. The whole
industry is a scam designed to be just barely enough to get the next round of
funding, this project just further supported this systematic structural flaw.

~~~
tim333
>Computers are not generally useful for a classroom

I kind of agree with that. There seems a bit of a common problem with
charitable 1st world people building things for 3rd world countries that they
assume some distorted idea of what they want when they probably did school
with pen, paper and books themselves and that's probably what works elsewhere.
See also
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Africar](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Africar)
\- people in Africa don't want wooden cars - they drive Toyotas and similar,
just often beat up ones. Usually what works in poor places is the same as what
works in richer one but a bit lower budget.

------
growtofill
> some potential buyers were dubious of anything that wasn’t Microsoft
> Windows. They wanted students to learn an interface they’d be using for the
> rest of their lives

Haven’t found a screenshot of Sugar OS in the article, but I assume it’s not
that different conceptually? Still files, apps, windows?

~~~
mathnode
Not at all, it was a rather funky radial menu.

I have no idea why it wasn't just a customised version of something like xfce,
lxqt and what have you.

~~~
ehvatum
Remember, this was a low power computer with limited memory, for children, and
getting it into the hands of those children as soon as possible was paramount.
So, naturally, the user interface had to be alien and written completely from
scratch in Python. Existing user interface paradigms were obviously a non-
starter. Time-tested ways of doing things were not applicable. Children are
not going to understand concepts such as background tasks and multiple
windows. Have you ever seen a child try to use a real computer? They just
don't get it. Everyone knows this.

------
protomyth
A parent or even school system in a rural state couldn't buy them at all. If
you weren't one of their projects, you didn't matter. Their G1G1 was just
rubbing salt.

~~~
RodgerTheGreat
The refusal to sell the laptops to hobbyists (beyond the short-lived G1G1
program) and first-world school systems was _apparently_ motivated by problems
managing expectations for the low-power machines. G1G1 resulted in a large
number of complaints and support requests from people who expected a
commercial-grade "laptop", and the foundation was unwilling or unable to deal
with them.

That said, I think ignoring the first world was an enormous misstep. Under-
funded US schools would have benefited immensely from OLPCs, and a large
domestic demand for the devices would have helped scale up production,
reducing cost and increasing availability for poorer countries as well.

~~~
fragmede
The 'Tesla model's as it were. Sell high end sports cars to enthusiasts first
and use that to fund further development. Next a luxury sedan, where profit
margins are higher, before moving down to the cutthroat economy market (a step
that Telsa is still yet to fully realize since the promised cheap Tesla is
still unavailable). It seems to have worked for Tesla.

------
LoveDeathRobots
What really killed OLPC:

"Negroponte of $100 One Laptop Per Child Sued for Patent Infringement"

[http://www.huliq.com/43721/negroponte-100-one-laptop-
child-s...](http://www.huliq.com/43721/negroponte-100-one-laptop-child-sued-
patent-infringement)

"Intel: doing the dirty on OLPC"

[https://web.archive.org/web/20130517082425/http://www.p2pnet...](https://web.archive.org/web/20130517082425/http://www.p2pnet.net/story/14124)

Oct 2005: “Remember that a key part of our strategy is to create a situation
where even if Nick rejects us for philosophical reasons there is a long and
visible history of our attempts to work with them and then we have to ask to
get a license for the "open source hardware" and we will make our own offering
on the commercial side.” Craig Mundie

[http://www.groklaw.net/articlebasic.php?story=20100114225709...](http://www.groklaw.net/articlebasic.php?story=2010011422570951)

------
tibbydudeza
I don't think giving kids iPads will make the mediocre education system any
better or for that matter something like Khan Academy (more of a supplement).

But there are several companies in China and India doing e-learning but with
actual teachers and online tutoring involved.

------
fortran77
Fortunately there were other alternatives!

Raspberry Pis with a recycled TV that has HDMI input and an old USB keyboard
and can get someone up and running, often for under $100. (There are a lot of
old TVs around!)

------
classichasclass
I would have killed for the handcrank during the G1G1 days, but it turns out
it wasn't _completely_ vapourware. I finally saw a working one at Linux SCaLE
17x years after the fact, so I'm assuming some small number must actually have
been produced.

It wasn't practical, but I still love the concept.

[https://www.talospace.com/2019/03/a-close-look-at-raptor-
bla...](https://www.talospace.com/2019/03/a-close-look-at-raptor-blackbird-
and.html)

~~~
em-bee
i think the handcrank was an after-market product, created long after the OLPC
project had realized that it wouldn't actually work.

or rather, what wouldn't have worked is a handcrank built into the devices, as
the stresses would break it, whereas a handcrank mounted separately on a
table, connected to the laptop by a cable, doesn't have that problem.

~~~
Lerc
Even then it fails to take the lesson from history. If you want to run things
on human power, use a foot-pedal.

~~~
em-bee
right, and there were several places that built foot powered chargers.
actually, i remember thinking that whoever actually built that handcrank did
it more for the novelty value than to actually solve a problem.

------
brassattax
FWIW I bought one when G1G1 was still around ... I used to use it for Skype,
which actually worked pretty well.

Pulled it out of storage recently and my 6 year old daughter enjoys playing
around with the music apps. I also installed FakeNES. It works, and you can
map the screen-side buttons, but unfortunately they don't seem to want to work
at the same time so it's terrible for actually controlling.

Incredibly, the battery still holds a charge, but only for about an hour or
so.

------
jacobush
I had the dev board before there was a keyboard, or screen. It had some kind
of very different Python driven GUI. My task was to make Wine run on it, but I
never got too far. First, I never spent enough time on it, but it also had
some kind of very weird boot loader I never quite figured out. I think it had
some kind of lock or signature scheme, which was very odd at the time. (When
PCs were PCs and had BIOS, not EFI.)

~~~
messe
I believe the firmware was OpenFirmware, which is FORTH based and actually
rather nice.

~~~
DonHopkins
That's right! It's the Cadillac of Forth systems, with electric windows,
cruise control, luxurious Corinthian Leather upholstery, a retargeting
metacompiler, and emacs key bindings for command line and history editing.

[https://github.com/MitchBradley/openfirmware](https://github.com/MitchBradley/openfirmware)

Mitch Bradley also made a great Forth system implemented in C, which he
actively maintains (last updated 18 hours ago!):

[https://github.com/MitchBradley/cforth](https://github.com/MitchBradley/cforth)

See my other post about Forth:

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21049568](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21049568)

------
ralphc
I have an OLPC, bought at $7 at a thrift store. It appears to come on but
screen doesn't light up. Is there anywhere that these can get repaired? I'd
like to have a working one for historical purposes.

------
gadders
For some hilarious commentary on the OLPC project, you should read the Fake
Steve Jobs blog. He was at pains to point out that MIT Media Lab != MIT.

Someone last week said the Media Lab is called the Remedial Lab at MIT.

------
dang
Discussed at the time:
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16849374](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16849374)

------
gt2
Funny I just saw one of these 2 days ago in the Scottish National Museum.

------
mncharity
I suggest OLPC was a high-risk startup attempt at a window of opportunity for
a shoestring MVP bootstrap of an open-source open-education-resources chip-to-
society-full-stack path to rapid global-scale transformative change against
hostile opposition. And that it could have worked.

I don't know what I can usefully say here. Then, as now in OP and comments,
there's much confusion. So start there.

It's ~2005. OLPC is using the available computer-supported community discourse
tech - Wikimedia, mailing lists, and IRC. And it's not enough. Especially with
shoestring human resources, and having to be semi-closed due to intense
opposition. The press is its usual confused. But so are professional
communities which needn't be. In an alternate universe, there's an extra
developer-relations person, so Guido is a champion instead of clueless, and
the python community doesn't fail to engage. Today, discourse tech still
sucks. A postmortem on humanity may read "the software engineering community
wasn't incentivized to create tools to permit sanity". It'd be nice to improve
on that.

What else... Be careful over-simplifying your strategic story. "Jump to scale
or fail" helped focus scarce resources on navigating the one chance of
success. No need to worry about things that will "just happen by themselves"
once scale occurs. Scale can be assumed, as either it exists, or you don't.
And if the jump is clean and discrete, great. But in the mushy messy have-we-
jumped-yet fingers-on-the-edge case, having organized for that regime can
matter.

What else... It seemed the prospect of broad impact was pulling in science
folk who otherwise wouldn't be creating open-education content. And a recent
MIT cell-biology VR project, which for domain expertise pulled in researchers
for interviews, mentioned one challenge was getting them to leave. So if some
other new opportunity generates similar interest, it may be possible to
attract more and better such resources than is obvious, or presently utilized.
It's hard to overstate just how bad even the best of current science education
content is. Perhaps AR will enable such opportunities.

Ah well. One challenge teaching history, is conveying its contingency. How
easily the world could have been a very different place today.

A last thought, just for perspective: It's easy to forget the cost of delay.
350k people were born today. 2.5M last week. And this. They will most all be
in school 6 years from now. Schools that are pervasively wretched. What can
you do to help change that? You've 6 years. Tick tock. It's a pipeline, so if
your transformation takes an extra year, you miss a cohort of 130 million
kids. 4 years costs half a billion. Tick, tick, tick...

And it's not a "them" problem. Setting up an analogy, Mexico average high-
school graduates can look like average US high-school dropouts. So if your
transformative change makes them look like average US hs graduates, like
awesome wow! But... average US high-school graduates? Pity the transformation
wasn't just a little bit greater. And so if you tell me your transformative
change will give every US high-school graduate the grasp of science of an
average entering Harvard freshman, well, like awesome wow! Great for societal
equity! But... Harvard freshman? Pity their science education is still failing
them so very badly.

------
amos19870630
A very informative article.

