
OLPC’s $100 laptop was going to change the world - ChrisArchitect
https://www.theverge.com/2018/4/16/17233946/olpcs-100-laptop-education-where-is-it-now
======
krupan
I don't know how they fared in 3rd world countries, but before OLPC every
laptop was upwards of $800 dollars, if I remember right. There were small low-
power laptops akin to OLPC's XO, but you had to pay a premium for those. The
concept of a $100 laptop was revolutionary (even though, as I remember, they
never really got the price below $200, but still!) and it spawned a whole slew
of cheap small commercial laptops (generally called netbooks). Chromebooks are
a direct descendant of the XO laptop.

I bought one when they came out in 2007 and there still isn't a laptop that
I've seen that is a durable as the XO. My 3-year old at the time danced on top
of it, threw it across the room, and dropped it countless times and it was
just fine. It came with a complete repair manual and you could use standard
tools to take it apart and put it back together, which I did for fun even
though I never needed to. The membrane keyboard was almost unusable and
eventually one of the kids that I let play with it dug their fingernail into
the edge of a key and ripped it right off. It would have been easy to replace
the membrane, but by then we weren't really using it much.

The screen was pretty nifty for its time. It was dual mode, backlit or
frontlit. You could go outside on a sunny day, turn off the backlight and have
a high-resolution frontlit, completely readable (though black and white)
display. It didn't look amazing indoors and new phone screens are readable
both indoors and out for the most part, but again _for its time_ it was
amazing.

~~~
Kluny
> The screen was pretty nifty for its time. It was dual mode, backlit or
> frontlit. You could go outside on a sunny day, turn off the backlight and
> have a high-resolution frontlit, completely readable (though black and
> white) display.

I had no idea that was even possible. Are there any laptops available that
have this feature now? I would kill to be able to write blog posts and work on
my book or do terminal work outside on a sunny day.

~~~
ghaff
What you want is a laptop with an e-ink display. There isn't one AFAIK. The
refresh rate is one big limitation. One could design a laptop specifically for
writing and reading but it would be pretty special purpose. As I recall, the
CTO of OLPC went off to try to make a display with e-ink characteristics that
would be more suitable for laptops but wasn't able to bring anything to
market.

~~~
krupan
To be clear, the XO's display was not e-ink. It was regular frontlit LCD with
a fast refresh rate. The downside was that the backlit mode never looked very
good indoors. If someone could fix that problem I bet we'd have that screen on
every portable device.

~~~
bronson
No, it really didn't. And reflective outdoors looked even worse. In the shade,
it was washed out and the colors were wrong. In the sun, it looked like a
bizarre black-and-white rendition of something where, if you concentrated, you
could guess what it was trying to display.

With a lot more development time maybe they could have fixed the problems.
Maybe.

~~~
burfog
Did you switch modes? There was a mode switch.

In grayscale mode, you got 1200x900 resolution. That was about 200 dpi, so
quite sharp for the day. (typical was more like 85 dpi back then)

In color mode, the screen was blurred. It was a 3x3 blur, without the typical
pixel/subpixel distinction. Effective resolution was something like 692x519
based on the number of green pixels.

Color mode in the sunlight would look grey, but it was still blurry. You had
to switch modes if you wanted the full 1200x900.

~~~
bitwize
There was not a mode switch, at least not on my OLPC. You switched from color
to B&W by turning the backlight brightness all the way down (thus shutting off
the backlight).

~~~
burfog
That was a mode switch.

Turning backlight brightness all the way down was the mode switch as presented
in the UI. Very old versions of the UI made it explicit. At the MMIO level of
course, there was a bit that got toggled.

------
jay-anderson
I still have mine, but I haven't pulled it out in quite a while. It was quite
slow, but I remember it using it fondly and really liked the sugar UI
([https://sugarlabs.org/](https://sugarlabs.org/)). My kids were very young
and we had fun messing around with it (there was a nifty audio application
that I remember). Another thing I remember about it was the security system,
bitfrost, which seemed well thought out. It also had LEDs wired into the mic
and camera so you knew when they were listening/watching. I'd really like to
see that in other laptops.

~~~
klenwell
This sums up my experience, too. My only real use for it ended up being for
weekend/day trips where I didn't need to work and wanted to be quasi-offline
but might want to connect to a third-party wifi system (like a motel's) for
some light internet browsing.

Anybody still doing anything useful or interesting with theirs?

~~~
avhon1
One of my friends brings either an OLPC or an Alphasmart to Burning Man every
year.

In one of my other comments in this thread, I mentioned that I used my olpc to
animate this logo [0] and to make a patch adding a dodecahedron to the X.org
utility ico [1].

[0]
[http://bloominglabs.org/index.php/Logo#Animated_Logo](http://bloominglabs.org/index.php/Logo#Animated_Logo)

[1] [https://linux.die.net/man/1/ico](https://linux.die.net/man/1/ico)

~~~
protomyth
I miss the Alphasmart stuff. They always felt like the spiritual successor to
the TRS-80 Model 100 which was an amazing writing machine for its day.

------
kuwze
There is a huge history of how much aid has hurt African countries[0].

After doing a bit of research, I have come to the conclusion that the best way
to help poor people is to give away phones. I think it would really help
people keep in contact with friends and family as well as help bootstrap
innumerous businesses and really help the GDP of these countries. Sadly I have
yet to find a service that lets me send new (cheap) smartphones to people in
need.

Although I do not like a tiered internet, I do like the premise of
Zuckerberg's Internet.org project. I think that access to Wikipedia in
particular should be a right these days. For some reason I always idolize it
(along with Kindles) as being the path towards creating a Hitchiker's Guide to
the Galaxy for everyone.

[0]: [https://www.amazon.com/Dead-Aid-Working-Better-
Africa/dp/037...](https://www.amazon.com/Dead-Aid-Working-Better-
Africa/dp/0374532125)

~~~
sdenton4
I would recommend GiveDirectly. They give can, not phones, but for any family
whose first priority is a phone, they'll get a phone. Others might get a roof
first, to deal with leaks leading to sleepless nights, or proper flooring to
deal with parasites that live in dirt floors; both of these are problems with
major impacts on educational outcomes, which individual families will know
they need to deal with. And families that have those needs met will almost
certainly go in for a phone or two.

------
jecel
I am a big fan and consider it to have been a success, though not what
Negroponte hoped for. Back in 2006 I helped them out (they even gave me a
machine as thanks) but the advice I gave them was ignored. I told them at
least Brazil and India (and probably other countries) would insist on making
them locally instead of importing from China and that if the children
themselves could make their own computers it would be even better (see
Raspberry Pi and 3D printed cases). I also told them I had experience with
children and they normally hated trackpads, preferring (in order) mice, big
trackballs, the IBM rubber thing and joysticks instead. The first time a child
ever saw a XO-1 was when they were about to ship and wanted to prove that a
kid could take it apart and put it back together.

~~~
lioeters
"if the children themselves could make their own computers it would be even
better (see Raspberry Pi and 3D printed cases)"

I love this idea of letting children/students build their own computers. If
it's designed well, it could be both educational and economical. They can
learn about the parts and what they do - processor, memory, storage device,
etc. - while they're putting them together. Then they can explore the
operating system and start programming their own applications..

~~~
jquast
[https://pi-top.com](https://pi-top.com)

------
berg01
I played with one back when it was just launched. Besides the innovative
outdoor-friendly display it was an insanely bad experience. MIT Media Lab (and
with that I mean Nicholas Negroponte) gone crazy.

The UX (both keyboard and software) was .. just awful.

~~~
whitepoplar
Any chance you could comment further on this? What in particular made it bad?

~~~
switchbak
I had one back in the day, and it was the worst computing experience I can
remember. The keyboard was like what you'd find on a speak-and-spell, and the
system had the performance of a low-end 486 under heavy swap.

I still don't understand why the system performed so poorly, I know a lot of
Sugar was written in Python, but there must have been some very fundamental
problems with it. Switching to an existing lightweight X window manager was a
much better (but still not good) experience.

~~~
bitwize
Sugar wasn't just written in Python. Parts of it were literally coded in the
worst way possible. We're talking Daily WTF levels.

For example, the icon for each Sugar "activity" was an SVG file. When you
started an activity, its icon would "throb" in the center of the screen,
fading in and out. Guess how the throbbing was implemented.

That's right, it would perform string substitution on the SVG file, filling in
the actual colors for macros embedded in the SVG, then reparse and redisplay
the SVG. For each frame.

Had it been a simple matter of being written in Python, Sugar might've been
usable. But it was _shitty_ Python and that's what killed it.

~~~
jancsika
> That's right, it would perform string substitution on the SVG file, filling
> in the actual colors for macros embedded in the SVG, then reparse and
> redisplay the SVG. For each frame.

That's intriguing!

I can imagine a path to how they got there:

1\. PyGTK (or whatever they were using) has methods to load and display an
image.

2\. A supported image type is svg+xml

3\. SVG is vector graphics. Awesome! Let's use that.

4\. Animation is needed, so we consider just ramping the opacity attribute,
scaling attribute, etc.

5\. We don't have any methods for DOM access. Oops.

6\. However, we do have our loaded SVG file which is just plain text.

7\. Well, we _can_ just s/OPACITY/RAMP_VALUE or whatever and display that for
our animation. That _at least_ doesn't require a read from the harddrive for
each frame. :)

Speaking of which-- I've seen developers do animation by repeatedly _reading a
file from the harddrive_ in the same process/thread as a realtime audio
engine.

Edit: clarification

~~~
bitwize
I uh...I don't remember for sure, but I can't guarantee that the Sugar code
didn't reload the SVG file from disk for each frame.

The whole thing was madness, all the way down. It's a wonder it worked at all.

~~~
jancsika
At 24 FPS that gives you a total of 41.67 milliseconds to fetch the file from
the harddrive, parse it, and display it.

The harddrive was flash memory, no? So we're probably talking hundreds of
microseconds to read the file into memory. Let's say 670 microseconds for a
rough guess.

That still leaves 41 milliseconds to parse and display the file.

Of course the animation is happening at an arbitrary program's load time which
is probably particularly CPU heavy. But OLPC apparently had two cores, so the
process controlling the SVG animation should have been able to safely hit its
deadlines.

I'm going to guess that the animation was smooth when trivial consumer single-
process apps were loaded and janky when something like an office application
was opened.

Am I right, or was it always janky?

~~~
bitwize
It was never smooth, I don't think it ever ran at 24 fps. But the throbbing
was slow enough you didn't notice.

There were no "office" applications for Sugar. The closest it got were
Sugarized versions of Firefox and AbiWord. The animation, as I recall, was
somewhat jankier when attempting to load one of these.

~~~
jancsika
I checked out a few youtube videos like this one[1].

Now I'm wondering whether the lack of smoothness was actually jank or just the
choice to animate at a low frame rate.

The animation looks bad but generally uniform in its timing. So I'm guessing
whoever coded that just assumed their method of animation was so klunky that
they went ahead and set the delay interval to a large value.

It might have helped to use a retro-style step animation, like filling up a
cup a quarter at a time where each 1/4 cup is a lighter shade of the same
color.

[1]
[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cdUSpkghdA4](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cdUSpkghdA4)

------
toomanybeersies
I don't think that OLPC failed, it was just superseded by the smartphone and
the tablet.

I can buy an 8" tablet from Aliexpress and get it shipped to me for $70, it
even has a SIM slot.

In my travels through Asia, I've discovered that practically everyone has a
smartphone. Most of these people have never owned a PC and never will, but
they all have computers now.

------
discussedbefore
It's great to read the ongoing stories from the boots-on-the-ground still
doing the actual deployments:
[http://planet.laptop.org](http://planet.laptop.org)

Unfortunately as the project loses momentum these types of stories are
dwindling; here's one example from the aggregator:

[http://blog.olenepal.org/index.php/archives/2630](http://blog.olenepal.org/index.php/archives/2630)

------
bzg
OLPC is certainly history now and Sugar Labs, while still active, is
struggling to keep Sugar relevant.

We at OLPC France started [https://sugarizer.org](https://sugarizer.org) : a
HTML/JS rewrite of Sugar. Real-time collaboration on pedagogical activities,
the journal to browse past activities, all this in plain HTML/JS.

Contributions are welcome!

------
shams93
It was a pretty nifty little device for its time, I used one as my main laptop
for a while but it was super duper slow my raspberry pi3 smokes it. It would
be so cool if they released that same form factor as a device that you plug
your pi into. The actual industrial design was fantastic I would love the same
housing to turn my pi into a little laptop.

~~~
pythonaut_16
Have you seen this? [https://pi-top.com/](https://pi-top.com/)

I don't know how it compares to OLPC, but it's basically what you're
describing.

~~~
avhon1
As shams93 said, the OLPC has _tremendous_ industrial design, which nothing
else I've ever seen matches. The plastic pieces are remarkably thick, and they
all either slide or screw together. There are no sharp corners on the
exterior. The textured surface is easy to hold and resists scratching and
gouging. The latches are simple, durable, double as port covers, and are
adorable. When closed, a series of ridges going all the way around the lid
meet in to the body to keep dirt, dust, bugs, etc. from being smeared all over
the screen. The screen is rubber shock-mounted. You only need one tool to
disassemble the entire laptop. It has a friggin' _handle_. The lithium-iron
phosphate batteries are much more durable than other laptop batteries [0]. And
it also has the glorious sunlight-readable display.

The pi-top is only very superficially what shams93 describes.

[0]
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lithium_iron_phosphate_battery](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lithium_iron_phosphate_battery)

------
peterburkimsher
I'd just like to share a story from XKCDB, the chatlog of XKCD's IRC channel.
[http://www.xkcdb.com/10124](http://www.xkcdb.com/10124)

XMPPwocky: My own [https://xkcd.com/349/](https://xkcd.com/349/) story.
Yesterday, I worked my way from "I should try installing Qubes OS on my dual-
boot" to "I have no working boot discs, no CD drive, and no OS on the actual
hard drive". Today, i got to try and fix that.

XMPPwocky: The issue is, this is my only computer. so I can't make any
bootable media to boot from, except I also had, tucked away in my closet, an
OLPC XO-1. Aaand I couldn't find the charger.

XMPPwocky: What I could find? The hand-crank charger.

XMPPwocky: To make a long story short, I cranked through the entire download
and installation of an Ubuntu liveCD.

XMPPwocky: would not recommend

------
Mizza
I had an OLPC and lived with somebody who worked on the OLPC project at the
time.

One of the more bizarre twists of the project was that, I think in part
because of the well intentioned but incredibly naive liberal utopianism of the
project, to use an existing computing paradigm (windows, mouse pointers, etc)
would be a form of colonialism.

Therefore, to avoid being colonial oppressors, these educational laptops
required a completely new desktop environment and computer interaction
paradigm. Obviously, since the colonial computing environment uses lots of
rectangles, everything in this decolonized paradigm would be circles. Lots and
lots of circles. Obviously, this put the project massively behind schedule,
and it was beaten to the punch by the flood of super cheap Asus "netbook"
computers - which all ran Windows XP or Ubuntu Netbook Edition.

I finally became disillusioned after going to an incredibly cringey talk with
Nicholas Negropente, where his answer about why do African children need
laptops rather than vaccines was that we should imagine the beauty of a family
in a hut gathered round the an OLPC reading Wikipedia together, or some such
drivel. He was really out of his depth, and I think probably only got the
project because of his brother's connections.

Still, I loved the OLPC. Cool toy, great screen. Once the Intel clones and the
RPi came out, it became completely irrelevant though.

------
protomyth
You had to be the right kind of poor to be able to buy the OLPC. They were not
very interested in selling domestically in the US (except for that buy 2 get 1
offer). Chromebooks and cellphones hit the price point now, and don't require
an NGO.

~~~
burfog
Yep. I was helping the project as a volunteer, and the refusal to help
America's poor really offended me. Americans were treated as a source of
funding. I always got a sense that exotic cultures/languages/peoples/countries
were adored, while plain old ordinary poor Americans were considered unworthy.
You couldn't just buy an OLPC XO-1 at Walmart for $185, which was about what
the devices actually cost. Instead it cost you $400. Parts suppliers hated
this too; they gave good pricing because they were promised high volume.

OLPC also ticked off a huge crowd of free software people who had
enthusiastically showed up to help. People were eager to support a machine
that would never run Windows... until they were betrayed on that. Lots of
people jumped ship over that, even though Microsoft didn't really follow
through.

Add in a few technical mistakes, and that was that: the WiFi on an internal
USB connection affecting power management, the dual-mode touchpad being
hopelessly inaccurate, Python being absurdly inappropriate for the GUI of a
low-end system, the 16-bit video depth causing terrible performance with all
modern code, depending on mesh networking which was more of a failing research
project than a viable protocol, some very experimental overlay filesystem
stuff...

~~~
telchar
Your mention of the poor touchpad accuracy really brought the frustration back
to me. That may have been the single biggest issue that drove me to stop using
mine. It's a shame, the XO had so much potential, but the problems you mention
doomed it. Much like the Aptera electric car around the same time (off topic,
but that was a similarly bold product that ultimately failed by a death of
1000 bad design decisions despite a lot of good ones).

------
NelsonMinar
"There’s surprisingly little hard data about the long-term impact of OLPCs on
childhood education"

For a project that was literally an educational experiment, that's pretty
damning.

------
linsomniac
Interesting story I always think of related to the OLPC. We had someone from
the project give a presentation to our local LUG, brought in by the excellent
Jonathan Corbet of LWN.

The early OLPC prototypes had a hand crank for power. Everyone loved that
idea, internally at the OLPC project and in the public. But, when they were
trying to build the final design, the materials scientists said the stresses
involved in that crank would cause longevity problems. "We can totally solve
this, we just need to make the frame out of titanium." "Uh... Thanks guys, but
this is supposed to be a $100 laptop."

~~~
cjbprime
I heard that there was an even more evocative death behind the hand crank
idea: Kofi Annan was demoing the prototype laptop with attached hand crank in
public, and the crank broke apart from the laptop while he was turning it.

I worked at OLPC, and I thought this aspect ultimately ended up fine: we
quickly moved to having a separate pullcord charger instead. The pullcord
didn't put any stress on the laptop, and you generated power with actual large
muscle groups along your body, rather than just rotating your wrist, so it was
massively more efficient. But everyone kept mentioning the crank, for sure.

~~~
telchar
I was very bummed that h g1g1 xo didn't come with a pullcord generator. I
thought it was a great idea.

------
newnewpdro
A friend of mine bought an XO-1 via the buy one give one program.

It never worked, when he showed it to me the thing wouldn't boot due to
storage errors and it was never fixed, DOA. I was seriously bummed out, as I
really wanted it to be the laptop I could use for hacking outside in direct
sunlight.

~~~
blacksmith_tb
I had one which I got a "normal" distro running on. It was slow, but a bit
better than Sugar, though it couldn't do any of the fun mesh-networking etc.
Lots of the most interesting ideas for the OLPC never quite shipped, like the
keycombo in to 'view-source' of the app you were in, which would let you hack
on the UI nondestructively[1].

1:
[http://wiki.laptop.org/go/OLPC_Human_Interface_Guidelines/Th...](http://wiki.laptop.org/go/OLPC_Human_Interface_Guidelines/The_Laptop_Experience/View_Source)

------
TheMagicHorsey
Charity can't beat profit-driven companies if there is a market. There was a
market, so smartphones emerged ... and the OLPC is hopelessly outclassed.

~~~
BtBfs
capitalism takes with one hand and gives with the other

------
epx
It is a typical case of 1st world people thinking they know what 3rd world
people need/want. Like the mythical $25 phone that nobody nowhere actually
wants.

------
DonHopkins
>After he outlined a dramatic (and ultimately metaphorical) plan to drop
tablets out of helicopters...

"I thought it would work! I planned those thing right down to the last detail.
It was perfect! Where'd you get those tablets???"

"As God as my witness, I though tablets could fly."

[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lf3mgmEdfwg](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lf3mgmEdfwg)

------
ggm
I find the failure list dispiriting. Because of what I think it says about the
critics more than the critique. I still feel by intent and outcome it's more
victory than failure. People learned things, including kids. Negroponte and
everyone else should celebrate trying, if not fully succeeding.

This is judging the Newton by the iPad. It's judging stallman by torvalds.
It's judging CDE by KDE

------
neolefty
Everywhere and nowhere. I thought they helped inspire the current round of
affordable computers (chromebooks, phones, cheap laptops, pi, etc)?

~~~
pasbesoin
Yep.

I'm still waiting on my transflective screen, though.

And on world education.

But hey, these people tried to create a solution. How many people talk and
talk, but never do anything?

And even if they didn't succeed as originally intended, all you people typing
on your oh-so thin and light ultrabooks, can thank OLPC for helping get the
ball rolling.

~~~
neolefty
World education is gradually improving! It's a combination of processes of
human development and technological aids. Rather than look for a complete
solution, I look for whether the situation is improving. Because it's true
that most peoples' lives are still depressingly non-optimal!

For example this graph of literacy over the last 25 years (under the heading
"Regional Disparities"):

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Literacy#Regional_disparities](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Literacy#Regional_disparities)

------
nnq
...did they solve the Internet connectivity problem? Did their mesh network
thing ever work?

If they didn't, no wonder it didn't catch on, kids needed _connectivity_
first, hopefully with ability to play videos and easy to share them and other
high-volume content via dirt cheap usb-sticks (a free stick should've been
included in the pack), not something to write on as pen and paper are much
better for that when learning anyway...

Or at least was it usable as a kindle substitute and did it came preloaded
with at least a few thousand sciency books on it? To make it at least sort of
usable without networking... No?!

...then what problem were they solving?!

~~~
avhon1
> Did their mesh network thing ever work?

Yes it did. Anecdotal, but I've gotten my two OLPC XO-1 laptops to network
together just fine.

> did it came preloaded with at least a few thousand sciency books on it?

Yes it did. They're called Collections [0], and part of the deployment process
is to select what collections will be on the laptops [1]. Here [2] is a
listing of the collections on the default English release.

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

[1]
[http://wiki.laptop.org/go/Deployment_Guide_2011/Purchase_Agr...](http://wiki.laptop.org/go/Deployment_Guide_2011/Purchase_Agreements_and_Ordering_Process)

[2] [http://alexvh.me/share/olpc-library-
listing.txt](http://alexvh.me/share/olpc-library-listing.txt)

------
everybodyknows
In this decade, there's Endless Mobile. Also attempted to compete with
commodity hardware, with similar results. Now apparently redefining mission to
software-only: a distro for commodity PC hardware.

[https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/1381437927/endless-
comp...](https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/1381437927/endless-
computers/description)

[https://endlessos.com/home/](https://endlessos.com/home/)

~~~
staz
To be fair this decade real attempt was the RaspberryPi and it turned out
incredibly well.

------
textmode
OLPC had an Open Firmware Forth bootloader. True? False?

Why did OLPC require a "developer key"? (develop.sig)

Will there ever be OpenFirmware-compatible hardware where the Forth bootloader
is signed by _the owner of the computer_?

Will the buyer ever have the option of owning and controlling the so-called
"developer key"?

Will there always be a requirement for the seller to retain a "developer key"
and for the buyer to request it after purchase? Why or why not?

~~~
avhon1
> OLPC had an Open Firmware Forth bootloader. True? False?

True. [0]

> Why did OLPC require a "developer key"?

So that kids can't casually screw up their laptops, but people who want to
modify their software can. You can read more here [1] and here [2].

Your other questions appear to be more speculative and less specific to OLPC,
so I can't answer them.

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

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

[2]
[http://wiki.laptop.org/go/Activation_and_Developer_Keys](http://wiki.laptop.org/go/Activation_and_Developer_Keys)

------
brandelune
OLPC was a huge success. But not the way Negroponte expected.

The OLPC scared the industry to death. MS was so scared that it made Windows
work on it. Tablets did not exist as consumer goods at the time (we had some
but only for businesses and they were not practical to use) and all the major
PC maker were expected year after year to churn out low cost laptops for the
"education" market.

Then tablets came and the whole product category just disappeared.

------
reptantchaos92
I got one on the buy one, give one initiative; and being cheap was only a
plus, but it was great for it's purpose; as a kid's laptop.

I gave it away a few years ago to someone who could give it a better use
(teacher), but now that I have a kid on my own, I'd like to give him something
like this. Any recommendations?

~~~
bryanlarsen
Raspberry Pi + [https://pi-top.com/](https://pi-top.com/) \+ sugar on a stick
([https://github.com/sugarlabs/sugar/blob/master/docs/rpi-
soas...](https://github.com/sugarlabs/sugar/blob/master/docs/rpi-soas.md))

~~~
AdmiralAsshat
Was pretty excited at the pi-top on first glance, but, $319 for what's
basically a screen and a clamshell enclosure to the Pi? Yikes. Surely we can
do better. The Superbook is a clamshell laptop powered by your smartphone and
costs half that.[0]

[0][http://www.sentio.com/](http://www.sentio.com/)

------
Myrmornis
> Designers dropped the feature almost immediately after Negroponte’s
> announcement, because the winding process put stress on the laptop’s body
> and demanded energy that kids in very poor areas couldn’t spare.

Err, kids in poor areas have less ability to turn a handle than those in
wealthy areas?

------
johnhenry
I think the key element missing here is the lack of infrastructure to support
technology. I wonder if this would have been more successful if coupled with
something like Project Loon.

------
DonHopkins
John Perry Barlow with an OLPC XO-1 Children's Computer.

[https://imgur.com/a/ogE9y](https://imgur.com/a/ogE9y)

~~~
avhon1
RMS also used an OLPC for a while.

[https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/e/eb/Stephen_...](https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/e/eb/Stephen_Birch_-
_Richard_Stallman_with_OLPC_%28by%29.jpg)

[https://stallman.org/stallman-computing.html](https://stallman.org/stallman-
computing.html)

------
gjem97
I have an extra one that still works. If anyone is interested in it, please
let me know. I will send it to you if you pay for shipping.

~~~
mrbill
I'd like it.

------
cagenut
This article's tone and framing is negative and about failure, but imho this
is just a weird capitalist winner-take-all notion of success. The numbers in
the article show that millions of units were shipped and you can pretty
clearly infer that tens of millions of children had access to a computer they
otherwise wouldn't have. As someone who's childhood access to an apple2e was a
massive privilege and advantage, I know damn well if I was one of those tens
of millions of kids I'd be better off for it.

So this "failure" seems to have helped millions, learned a bunch and developed
some OSS. I should hope to fail so hard myself someday.

------
Dibbles
I think nowadays you could make a laptop with a solar panel on it's back.
That'd be pretty cool.

------
IloveHN84
Lost and forgotten in favour of more expensive laptops. The same applies to
Android One/Go

------
dingo_bat
The real reason why OLPC failed is that children in downtrodden countries
don't need a laptop. They need food, a healthy environment, good old fashioned
classroom education and plenty of pens and notebooks. A laptop is the worst
tool you can use for studying.

I went through my entire school and undergraduate college without once
bringing my laptop into the classroom. My mother and father learned to program
in FORTRAN using nothing but pen, paper and the occasional slide rule.

Paper books, decent sized notebooks and ballpoint pens. Spend $100 on that.
That will actually help. This whole project was solving a first world problem
in the third world.

~~~
VikingCoder
I thought it was crap, too, until I read:

The cheapest way to give 100 books to someone in the third world is to give
them a laptop (and a way to power it.)

Also, for most of their target audience, the laptop would be the brightest
source of light in their home.

This image, in particular:

[http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/africa/6990034.stm](http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/africa/6990034.stm)

So, no, don't think of it as a "laptop," it's just an educational device in a
laptop form factor.

That said, I had major problems with how OLPC executed on that vision.

~~~
SllX
So... do you need a laptop for that or an eReader?

Granted eReaders were a niche at the time of OLPC, we didn't fully grok where
laptops fell on the useful vs distracting scale and the idea of a general
purpose computer you could also teach kids to code on seemed really really
cool and probably the best way to on-board them onto the internet.

All in all, OLPC's heart was in the right place, but until we know _how_ to
properly introduce computers into the classroom as a general purpose
educational device, something more like a rugged eReader and open source
textbooks feels like it would be more productive in accomplishing at least
some of the goals of OLPC.

~~~
jerf
If you ignore the question of whether an eReader is something with an eInk
display, an eReader is just a general-purpose computing device that has for
some reason been limited to reading books, so "do you need a laptop or an
eReader" doesn't seem to me to be a terribly meaningful question.

~~~
SllX
The difference is a laptop is custom built, with the required infrastructure
to serve the role of a general purpose computing device.

An eReader _can_ serve the role of a general purpose computing device, but it
would not serve that role as well as a laptop.

So if you optimize a rugged poly-carbonate brick you could take through a
Monsoon, Typhoon, Sandstorm and/or War Zone for the sole purpose of loading
text and simple document files and a low-power display, stuffed with only a
battery, enough compute power to accomplish the task it is given and cover any
overhead, and enough storage to hold however many books you decide you want it
to hold, without any graphics or sound (or perhaps very simple graphics), then
you still have something meaningful.

You have a Library of Alexandria that any kid can carry in their arms without
any of the ideological attachments that the XO had. It holds information in a
human readable format and is capable of displaying that information to the
person who holds it so long as they are literate.

Much like a modern day light bulb can be a general-purpose computing device
that for some reason has been limited to turning on and off in different
colors. It might not seem terribly useful to you, but it thanklessly serves
the role it has been tasked with without a source code button, a mesh network,
a fancy GUI, or a Squeak environment.

It is a meaningful distinction to make because it will ultimately shape your
budget and your ability to actually distribute devices in meaningful
quantities to the device's intended users.

~~~
VikingCoder
Eh.

I'm all for designing things right, but I think it's not important to get
caught up in the naming.

Display. Storage. Battery. Some way to charge it when you're nowhere near
reliable electricity. Maybe a keyboard. Maybe the ability to communicate with
other ones in a mesh. Maybe they can hook up to the internet if it's
available.

And then lots and lots of great content pre-loaded.

For instance, ka-lite, the downloadable Khan Academy:

"The 4781 videos that are available currently have a size of 57.1 Gigabyte."

That's really not that big, any more.

~~~
PenguinCoder
I was unaware of ka lite, but this looks like exactly something I was looking
for. Thanks for the information!

------
skookumchuck
I remember when a calculator was hundreds of dollars. Eventually they wound up
hanging on a tab in the supermarket for $1.99 and then given away as premiums
with [Your Business's Name Here] embossed on them. Quite the ignominous end
:-)

E-readers haven't sunk that far yet, but they're getting close.

