17 ms·

OLPC’s $100 laptop was going to change the world (2018)

211 points by zer0tonin 7y ago

growtofill 7y ago
> 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 7y ago
  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 7y ago
    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.
- a-saleh 7y ago
  Not on the surface? In the shell you have select "activities" that you can choose, and if the "activity" you chose is a standard linux app, or a explorer-style application (i.e. I remember I was still able to run Nautilus?) you would see file structure. But you would be able to use it without encountering "a file" or "a folder". I remember window management being minimalistic, apps went full-screen, there might have been a switcher.
- em-bee 7y ago
  you can try the interface on sugarizer.org it really is quite different. it centers around activities (which are apps effectively) but it has no windows, only fullscreen, and you can only open one activity at a time. to open another you have to close the current one. the state of an app is logged to a journal. to continue work that you did before you go to the journal to pick up the state that you are looking for. by default you get the apps last state, or you can choose to open a new fresh state. so for example you open the paint activity. first time you get a blank canvas. next time you get your last drawing. or you can select to create a new drawing. or use the journal to pick out an old drawing.
diegof79 7y ago
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.
- clueless123 7y ago
  Exactly the same for Peru where I live.
- jseliger 7y ago
  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. I suspect 1/100 or 1/500 or some similar number of people will be extraordinary autodidacts and, if you give them sufficient baseline education and an Internet-connected computer, they will get extraordinary results. I've worked on numerous 21st Century Community Learning Centers (21st CCLC) proposals that were supposed to get computers and the Internet in US schools from 2000 onwards. That effort has largely succeeded and not been a panacea. Today I still ban laptops in class: https://jakeseliger.com/2008/12/28/laptops-students-distraction-hardly-a-surprise https://jakeseliger.com/2008/12/28/laptops-students-distract... because they seem to detract from learning, on the net.
bane 7y ago
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 7y ago
  > 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. :)
- gmiller123456 7y ago
  The Raspberry Pi project seems to have learned a ton of hard lessons from both OLPC I tend to associate the Raspberry Pi much more with the Arduino movement. I know they marketed it as a cheap PC for the masses, but IMHO that was more to just get press coverage. In practice you pretty much already need to have a PC on hand to download and burn the OS image to an SD card. The alternative is to buy a grossly overpriced SD card with the OS already on it, which completely defeats the purpose of buying a cheap PC. I really haven't heard of any movement of the RPi making PCs available to people who didn't already have one.
amos19870630 7y ago
A very informative article.
quranicpower_27 7y ago
The enemy will always make your life measurably. They don’t want to see your personal life progress and achievement. https://www.quranicpowers.com/qurani-wazifa-to-destroy-enemy/ https://www.quranicpowers.com/qurani-wazifa-to-destroy-enemy...
onyva 7y ago
"...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
bryanwb 7y ago
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/
- hhas01 7y ago
  “dominated by male autodidacts” Nerds make the worst martinets. Sympathies. See also: The White Man’s Burden.
- ivanmilles 7y ago
  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 7y ago
    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.
jgrahamc 7y ago
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_Get_1_program https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/One_Laptop_per_Child#Give_1_Ge...). 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 7y ago
  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 7y ago
    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
  - avhon1 7y ago
    The Fedora-based distro is definitely a pain. Sugar has some neat ideas, it it's way too slow. I've enjoyed using mine with Debian and a tiling WM. Much snappier. http://wiki.laptop.org/go/Installing_Debian_as_an_upgrade#Step_1:_Create_debian_bootstrap http://wiki.laptop.org/go/Installing_Debian_as_an_upgrade#St...
jacobush 7y ago
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 7y ago
  I believe the firmware was OpenFirmware, which is FORTH based and actually rather nice.
  - DonHopkins 7y ago
    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
bArray 7y ago
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 7y ago
  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
dragonsh 7y ago
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.
antongribok 7y ago
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 7y ago
  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.
cptskippy 7y ago
> 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 7y ago
  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.
aaron695 7y ago
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 7y ago
  >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.
tibbydudeza 7y ago
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.
m4r35n357 7y ago
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 7y ago
  > 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 7y ago
    And silly because UI paradigms change anyways. And people are capable of keeping up.
    - AnIdiotOnTheNet 7y ago
      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 7y ago
        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!
senko 7y ago
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.
- baybal2 7y ago
  I'm have to say, things went wrong for OLPC the moment it was entrusted to a "development official" Chinese were able to make quite usable $60 laptops at around the same time OLPC's pre-subsidy pricetag went over $200
  - em-bee 7y ago
    at what scale? the problem with the cost of OLPC laptops was lack of scale.
    - baybal2 7y ago
      Then they should've spent all that money placing a big order, and not sitting and eating through them for 5 years
      - em-bee 7y ago
        how would they be able to do that? they didn't get all the money at once. you can't order what you can't sell. they expected to sell 10 times as many laptops as they actually sold. and it wasn't because of the price.
protomyth 7y ago
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 7y ago
  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 7y ago
    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.
gt2 7y ago
Funny I just saw one of these 2 days ago in the Scottish National Museum.
DonHopkins 7y ago
>Negroponte was furious. He lashed out at Intel, accusing it of approaching OLPC’s target markets and dumping laptops below cost to destroy the nonprofit. “Intel should be ashamed of itself,” he said. “It’s just — it’s just shameless.” Shameless??! I only wish Nicholas Negroponte would have directed some of his self-righteous anger towards his brother John Negroponte, who dumped so much hard cold cash and political support on right wing dictators and weapons dealers (and depleted uranium shells on Iraqi children), while willfully and knowingly ignoring the human rights abuses he was funding and covering up, and who has brutally harmed so many more children and parents and school teachers with his US taxpayer funded policies than Intel ever has with their cheap laptops, and who has a hell of a lot of blood and powdered DU on his hands for what he did in South America and Iraq. https://truthout.org/articles/iraqi-children-test-positive-for-depleted-uranium-near-former-us-air-base/ https://truthout.org/articles/iraqi-children-test-positive-f... >Iraqi Kids Test Positive for Depleted Uranium Remnants Near Former US Air Base. Two Iraqi boys walk among burnt U.S. ammunition trucks contaminated by U.S. depleted uranium bullets on May 3, 2003, in Baghdad, Iraq. For the first time, independent researchers have found that the bodies of Iraqi children born with congenital disabilities, such as heart disease and malformed limbs, near a former United States air base in southern Iraq are contaminated with high levels of radioactive heavy metals associated with toxic depleted uranium pollution leftover from the 2003 U.S.-led invasion. Nicholas must take solace in the fact that he isn't responsible for as many deaths, cancers, and acts of corruption as his brother John, for what it's worth. Nicholas Negroponte's OLPC boondoggle pales in comparison to John Negroponte's South American and Iraqi boondoggles. https://fas.org/irp/congress/2001_cr/s091401.html https://fas.org/irp/congress/2001_cr/s091401.html >Based upon the Committee's review of State Department and CIA documents, it would seem that Ambassador Negroponte knew far more about government perpetrated human rights abuses than he chose to share with the committee in 1989 or in Embassy contributions at the time to annual State Department Human Rights reports.
- thefounder 7y ago
  He is not his brother though, right?
  - bryanwb 7y ago
DonHopkins 7y ago
>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 7y ago
  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.
classichasclass 7y ago
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-blackbird-and.html https://www.talospace.com/2019/03/a-close-look-at-raptor-bla...
- em-bee 7y ago
  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 7y ago
    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 7y ago
      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 7y ago
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.
gadders 7y ago
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.
fortran77 7y ago
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!)
GnarfGnarf 7y ago
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.
nostrademons 7y ago
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.)
mncharity 7y ago
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.
dang 7y ago
Discussed at the time: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16849374 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16849374
ralphc 7y ago
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.
LoveDeathRobots 7y ago
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-sued-patent-infringement http://www.huliq.com/43721/negroponte-100-one-laptop-child-s... "Intel: doing the dirty on OLPC" https://web.archive.org/web/20130517082425/http://www.p2pnet.net/story/14124 https://web.archive.org/web/20130517082425/http://www.p2pnet... 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=2010011422570951 http://www.groklaw.net/articlebasic.php?story=20100114225709...

211 points by zer0tonin 7y ago

> 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 7y ago
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 7y ago
  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.
a-saleh 7y ago
Not on the surface? In the shell you have select "activities" that you can choose, and if the "activity" you chose is a standard linux app, or a explorer-style application (i.e. I remember I was still able to run Nautilus?) you would see file structure. But you would be able to use it without encountering "a file" or "a folder". I remember window management being minimalistic, apps went full-screen, there might have been a switcher.
em-bee 7y ago
you can try the interface on sugarizer.org it really is quite different. it centers around activities (which are apps effectively) but it has no windows, only fullscreen, and you can only open one activity at a time. to open another you have to close the current one. the state of an app is logged to a journal. to continue work that you did before you go to the journal to pick up the state that you are looking for. by default you get the apps last state, or you can choose to open a new fresh state. so for example you open the paint activity. first time you get a blank canvas. next time you get your last drawing. or you can select to create a new drawing. or use the journal to pick out an old drawing.

diegof79 7y ago

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.

clueless123 7y ago
Exactly the same for Peru where I live.
jseliger 7y ago
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. I suspect 1/100 or 1/500 or some similar number of people will be extraordinary autodidacts and, if you give them sufficient baseline education and an Internet-connected computer, they will get extraordinary results. I've worked on numerous 21st Century Community Learning Centers (21st CCLC) proposals that were supposed to get computers and the Internet in US schools from 2000 onwards. That effort has largely succeeded and not been a panacea. Today I still ban laptops in class: https://jakeseliger.com/2008/12/28/laptops-students-distraction-hardly-a-surprise https://jakeseliger.com/2008/12/28/laptops-students-distract... because they seem to detract from learning, on the net.

bane 7y ago

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 7y ago
> 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. :)
gmiller123456 7y ago
The Raspberry Pi project seems to have learned a ton of hard lessons from both OLPC I tend to associate the Raspberry Pi much more with the Arduino movement. I know they marketed it as a cheap PC for the masses, but IMHO that was more to just get press coverage. In practice you pretty much already need to have a PC on hand to download and burn the OS image to an SD card. The alternative is to buy a grossly overpriced SD card with the OS already on it, which completely defeats the purpose of buying a cheap PC. I really haven't heard of any movement of the RPi making PCs available to people who didn't already have one.

amos19870630 7y ago

A very informative article.

quranicpower_27 7y ago

The enemy will always make your life measurably. They don’t want to see your personal life progress and achievement. https://www.quranicpowers.com/qurani-wazifa-to-destroy-enemy/ https://www.quranicpowers.com/qurani-wazifa-to-destroy-enemy...

onyva 7y ago

"...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

bryanwb 7y ago

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/

hhas01 7y ago
“dominated by male autodidacts” Nerds make the worst martinets. Sympathies. See also: The White Man’s Burden.
ivanmilles 7y ago
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 7y ago
  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.

jgrahamc 7y ago

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_Get_1_program https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/One_Laptop_per_Child#Give_1_Ge...). 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 7y ago
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 7y ago
  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
- avhon1 7y ago
  The Fedora-based distro is definitely a pain. Sugar has some neat ideas, it it's way too slow. I've enjoyed using mine with Debian and a tiling WM. Much snappier. http://wiki.laptop.org/go/Installing_Debian_as_an_upgrade#Step_1:_Create_debian_bootstrap http://wiki.laptop.org/go/Installing_Debian_as_an_upgrade#St...

jacobush 7y ago

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 7y ago
I believe the firmware was OpenFirmware, which is FORTH based and actually rather nice.
- DonHopkins 7y ago
  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

bArray 7y ago

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 7y ago
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

dragonsh 7y ago

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.

antongribok 7y ago

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 7y ago
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.

cptskippy 7y ago

> 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 7y ago
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.

aaron695 7y ago

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 7y ago
>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.

tibbydudeza 7y ago

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.

m4r35n357 7y ago

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 7y ago
> 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 7y ago
  And silly because UI paradigms change anyways. And people are capable of keeping up.
  - AnIdiotOnTheNet 7y ago
    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 7y ago
      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!

senko 7y ago

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.

baybal2 7y ago
I'm have to say, things went wrong for OLPC the moment it was entrusted to a "development official" Chinese were able to make quite usable $60 laptops at around the same time OLPC's pre-subsidy pricetag went over $200
- em-bee 7y ago
  at what scale? the problem with the cost of OLPC laptops was lack of scale.
  - baybal2 7y ago
    Then they should've spent all that money placing a big order, and not sitting and eating through them for 5 years
    - em-bee 7y ago
      how would they be able to do that? they didn't get all the money at once. you can't order what you can't sell. they expected to sell 10 times as many laptops as they actually sold. and it wasn't because of the price.

protomyth 7y ago

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 7y ago
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 7y ago
  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.

gt2 7y ago

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

DonHopkins 7y ago

>Negroponte was furious. He lashed out at Intel, accusing it of approaching OLPC’s target markets and dumping laptops below cost to destroy the nonprofit. “Intel should be ashamed of itself,” he said. “It’s just — it’s just shameless.” Shameless??! I only wish Nicholas Negroponte would have directed some of his self-righteous anger towards his brother John Negroponte, who dumped so much hard cold cash and political support on right wing dictators and weapons dealers (and depleted uranium shells on Iraqi children), while willfully and knowingly ignoring the human rights abuses he was funding and covering up, and who has brutally harmed so many more children and parents and school teachers with his US taxpayer funded policies than Intel ever has with their cheap laptops, and who has a hell of a lot of blood and powdered DU on his hands for what he did in South America and Iraq. https://truthout.org/articles/iraqi-children-test-positive-for-depleted-uranium-near-former-us-air-base/ https://truthout.org/articles/iraqi-children-test-positive-f... >Iraqi Kids Test Positive for Depleted Uranium Remnants Near Former US Air Base. Two Iraqi boys walk among burnt U.S. ammunition trucks contaminated by U.S. depleted uranium bullets on May 3, 2003, in Baghdad, Iraq. For the first time, independent researchers have found that the bodies of Iraqi children born with congenital disabilities, such as heart disease and malformed limbs, near a former United States air base in southern Iraq are contaminated with high levels of radioactive heavy metals associated with toxic depleted uranium pollution leftover from the 2003 U.S.-led invasion. Nicholas must take solace in the fact that he isn't responsible for as many deaths, cancers, and acts of corruption as his brother John, for what it's worth. Nicholas Negroponte's OLPC boondoggle pales in comparison to John Negroponte's South American and Iraqi boondoggles. https://fas.org/irp/congress/2001_cr/s091401.html https://fas.org/irp/congress/2001_cr/s091401.html >Based upon the Committee's review of State Department and CIA documents, it would seem that Ambassador Negroponte knew far more about government perpetrated human rights abuses than he chose to share with the committee in 1989 or in Embassy contributions at the time to annual State Department Human Rights reports.

thefounder 7y ago
He is not his brother though, right?
- bryanwb 7y ago

DonHopkins 7y ago

>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 7y ago
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.

classichasclass 7y ago

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

em-bee 7y ago
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 7y ago
  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 7y ago
    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 7y ago

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.

gadders 7y ago

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.

fortran77 7y ago

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!)

GnarfGnarf 7y ago

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.

nostrademons 7y ago

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.)

mncharity 7y ago

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.

dang 7y ago

Discussed at the time: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16849374 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16849374

ralphc 7y ago

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.

LoveDeathRobots 7y ago

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-sued-patent-infringement http://www.huliq.com/43721/negroponte-100-one-laptop-child-s... "Intel: doing the dirty on OLPC" https://web.archive.org/web/20130517082425/http://www.p2pnet.net/story/14124 https://web.archive.org/web/20130517082425/http://www.p2pnet... 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=2010011422570951 http://www.groklaw.net/articlebasic.php?story=20100114225709...