One Laptop Per Child's $100 Laptop Was Going To Change the World -- Then it All Went Wrong (theverge.com)

Adi Robertson, reporting for The Verge: In late 2005, tech visionary and MIT Media Lab founder Nicholas Negroponte pulled the cloth cover off a small green computer with a bright yellow crank. The device was the first working prototype for Negroponte's new nonprofit One Laptop Per Child (OLPC), dubbed "the green machine" or simply "the $100 laptop." And it was like nothing that Negroponte's audience -- at either his panel at a UN-sponsored tech summit in Tunis, or around the globe -- had ever seen. After UN Secretary-General Kofi Annan offered a glowing introduction, Negroponte explained exactly why. The $100 laptop would have all the features of an ordinary computer but require so little electricity that a child could power it with a hand crank.

[...] But OLPC's overwhelming focus on high-tech hardware worried some skeptics, including participants in the Tunis summit. One attendee said she'd rather have "clean water and real schools" than laptops, and another saw OLPC as an American marketing ploy. "Under the guise of non-profitability, hundreds of millions of these laptops will be flogged off to our governments," he complained. In the tech world, people were skeptical of the laptop's design, too. Intel chairman Craig Barrett scathingly dubbed OLPC's toy-like prototype "the $100 gadget," and Bill Gates hated the screen in particular. "Geez, get a decent computer where you can actually read the text," he told reporters.

[...] After announcing "the $100 Laptop," OLPC had one job to do: make a laptop that cost $100. As the team developed the XO-1, they slowly realized that this wasn't going to happen. According to Bender, OLPC pushed the laptop's cost to a low of $130, but only by cutting so many corners that the laptop barely worked. Its price rose to around $180, and even then, the design had major tradeoffs. [...]

Comments

It actually sort of did change the world

[klingens]

As a reaction to the OLPC we got netbooks as an answer from conventional manufacturers. Yes netbooks were crappy but they still put a constant pressure on OEMs to make cheaper notebooks and lowered all prices for consumer mobile computers.
The OLPC project itself failed in its goals, but it helped bring us the low cost computing things like Raspberry type SBCs, chromebooks, sub 100$ tablets and phones we have today.

Re:It actually sort of did change the world

[bigpat]

As a reaction to the OLPC we got netbooks as an answer from conventional manufacturers. Yes netbooks were crappy but they still put a constant pressure on OEMs to make cheaper notebooks and lowered all prices for consumer mobile computers.
The OLPC project itself failed in its goals, but it helped bring us the low cost computing things like Raspberry type SBCs, chromebooks, sub 100$ tablets and phones we have today.

In the history of computing OLPC was a bit like how xerox palo alto research center (PARC) pushed the envelope of user interface design and inspired the first Apple Computer Macintosh and changed the world even though PARC didn't itself come out with those products.

I wouldn't diminish the ball that OLPC got rolling even if it failed to gain significant traction as its own enterprise. Schools and school children all over the world are increasingly getting access to usable sub $200 laptops and connected tablets that are giving them unprecedented access to knowledge like never before in the history of the world.

There is certainly still work to do to make sure that more people all over the world can freely share in knowledge.

technology outpaced it

[argStyopa]

The "one laptop per child" demand was met instead largely by smartphones.

While Negroponte was busily tilting at his particular windmill, Samsung and others built a more powerful, more legible, longer-service device that they could sell across the planet.

Score another one for the free market, really.

Re:technology outpaced it

[swillden]

The "one laptop per child" demand was met instead largely by smartphones.

Nothing has really met what I always thought was the coolest and most valuable goal of the OLPC project: Ultimate hackability. There was a "view source" button on the keyboard. For any program that happens to be running, you could press the "view source" button and get a window with the source code (everything was Python), which you could read and even modify at will. The system was designed to make this very safe, with easy restoration to a prior functional state and extremely strong sandboxing of all apps (the security model was very cool, actually) to limit the damage of malware.

I was really jazzed by the idea of turning hundreds of millions of kids loose on such an environment. Sure, a high percentage of them would have no interest in coding, but if 1% of them got interested in it that would be millions of young programmers, and some percentage of them would be brilliant. I was excited by the what this might mean for software engineering... and for third world countries who just might be able to turn themselves into software powerhouses.

But, it never happened. Instead, we have devices that in many ways have higher barriers to entry and are harder to program than traditional desktop OSes.

Re:Misplaced priorities, solving nonexistent...

[Gavagai80]

Right, all education in the world must stop until clean water and nutrition are fully addressed everywhere. What are you, a Taliban activist?

Re:Clean water, enough to eat, safe place to live

[dj245]

I agree with whoever anonymous person it was quoted in TFA: too many places on this planet, in 2018, have too many people who don't even have the basics to sustain their lives: clean water to drink, enough food to eat, and a safe place to live -- and actual schools for their children, not high-tech toys. How about we solve those problems for everyone on the planet first, instead of putting the cart before the horse?

The grand idea at the time was to get those people the information needed to lift themselves up. The OLPCs were intended to have an offline copy of Wikipedia as an example. The real-world problems tend to get solved quickly and cheaply when people can get information on how to purify water, farm more effectively, etc.

Re:It's a Shame...

[mysidia]

probably don't need a computer of any type. They need nutrition, and sanitation, and a clean water supply.

Oh, don't be so selfish. There are many kids in 3rd world countries who could benefit from the enhanced opportunities that computers could bring them to learn and communicate. The countries are 3rd world because of less economic development, and show me the children of a country, and I'll show you the future of a country's economy, business, science, and industry.

Many of the kids in 3rd world countries don't necessarily lack the necessary nutrition, sanitation, or clean water for survival, And the internet could help provide them empowering information or support needed to help more people in those countries become more effective, more intellectually capable to do science and tackle problems, more industrious, or better their community in other ways.

Re:Misplaced priorities, solving nonexistent...

[Pinky's Brain]

There's only so much you can do to uplift people without just running things and reshaping their entire culture (colonization).

Give them components they can't build themselves, information how to construct the well (internet) and don't brain drain the people who can construct wells with liberal migration policies. Don't just drill a well for them, it creates dependency and laziness.

Re:With Tablets is this even relevant anymore?

[Anonymous Coward]

OLPC inspired the wave of netbooks, which inspired the wave of tablets and smartphones. The OLPC itself didn't succeed very well but it made a major contribution to the computer industry, by catalyzing projects for smaller computers and demand for them. The smartphones and wireless Internet now widely available in developing countries are an indirect descendant of OLPC.

Actually, the project objective was still achieved

[GrpA]

I don't think the project failed at all.

It was quite an interesting and ambitious project at the time - the concept that a full PC could be manufactured for less than $1000. Many of us, at the time, said things like, "Think of all the cool things we could do with a laptop that only costs $100"... And you know, this was back when a laptop typically cost around $1000 or more, and was a complex computer.

Sure, it was ambitious, but it pushed the concept of a cheaper laptop for children far before anything in it's time, and first sub-$500 laptops came out.. Early small-screen devices with pretty good, if somewhat degraded performance.

And pretty soon the market realized that this was possible, and there was a market for it - cheaper laptops for kids and people who wouldn't otherwise use a computer.

So the market responded, and the capabilities that technology could bring changed. Smaller displays came out. Cheaper processors. Lower cost memory solutions. And people started buying these and pushing for embedded-able systems, and it happened.

Sure, OLPC as a product was a complete failure - they were like a pre-kickstarter project gone wrong - but they were the spark that lit the fire that continued to grow in intensity and they did succeed in one simply object just by existing - they re-aligned the market.

But, in a way, the vision they had wasn't lost. It was influenced, and it came to be... Just not with them.

So the end result was achieved by a failed project - which then brings up the question as to whether the project was to bring low-cost computers to children in third-world countries so they could change the world, or whether it was to sell laptops.

Because only one of those objectives wasn't achieved.

Of course, the Raspberry Pi was probably the spiritual successor to this concept and came out much later without the same fanfare and backslapping, but it did manage to succeed and change the world.

GrpA