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 chall

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?