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The little I played with it, I remember lots of random UI stuff built by different teams put together haphazardly, and a button press would sometimes take seconds to show a result on the screen... basically what you'd expect from an alpha product put together by volunteers on a shoestring budget.



I think the problem started out the other way, with way too much budget. They bit off more than they could chew. The budget cuts happened later.

If you had volunteers on a shoestring budget, you'd simply create a FVWM theme. It would be pretty normal, but with thick borders to compensate for the crude touchpad. You'd patch the program launcher to prevent running more than one thing at a time, thus dealing with the memory constraint and user confusion. That's it. Ship it.

Instead, they wrote a completely experimental desktop environment in an interpreted language. This is not the sort of project you'd bite off with volunteers on a shoestring budget.

I was a volunteer. I told them that stuff was nuts, but the paid staff were on a mission. Nothing could dissuade them. They wouldn't even dogfood. By that, I mean they didn't actually use the laptops. They used high-end developer workstations because the laptops were unusable. That should have been a hint.


How selfish and arrogant. They should have been using the system and testing the system with end users as often as possible with the goal of shipping a totally functional 1.0 by a fixed date. Look at the totally baked systems with long lifetimes (C64, 512k Mac, Apple 2e) in the education space. OLPC was too ambitious with not enough clarity.




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