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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. [...]
[...] 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 $180, and even then, the design had major tradeoffs. [...]
This was in 2005 when it kicked off. Android tablets weren't a viable option back then
As a reaction to the OLPC we got netbooks as an answer from conventional manufacturers. Yes netbooks were crappy but they still put a constant pressure on OEMs to make cheaper notebooks and lowered all prices for consumer mobile computers.
The OLPC project itself failed in its goals, but it helped bring us the low cost computing things like Raspberry type SBCs, chromebooks, sub 100$ tablets and phones we have today.
And the crank?
It little behooves the best of us to comment on the rest of us.
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.
And for a few glorious years, one could buy subnotebook-sized PCs at entry-level prices. They had an Atom CPU that could run full desktop operating systems at roughly Pentium 4 speeds, not the fastest but still usable. Thus one could use them to work on hobby programming projects while riding transit to and from a day job. Then Apple released the iPad and MacBook Air, and laptop makers dropped the entry-level subnotebook segment in favor of tablets and Ultrabook laptops with a higher profit margin.
My wife knows it's hard to get kids to sing when they are hungry, or don't know where they are sleeping tonight.
What kind of monster parents are you guys, anyway?!
#DeleteChrome
A lamp (LED based, crank, and/or solar charge) and reading material changes everything! The biggest innovation came when books were mass produced and the ability to read them at night (affordably) became possible. Otherwise, daylight is reserved for farming and thus a society is stuck in an agrarian stand-still.
Once a civilization becomes informed and enlightened, decision will be made to elect representatives that reflect their values. Otherwise, despots and dictators will fill the vacuum left in the wake of an ignorant populous and thus leave them in "shit hole" status. Speaking of shit holes, plumbing, specifically, the toilet, is a major quality of life improvement due to improvements in sanitary conditions.
Life is not for the lazy.
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.
-Styopa
Right, all education in the world must stop until clean water and nutrition are fully addressed everywhere. What are you, a Taliban activist?
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The third wold is not as illiterate as many Americans think they are. The OLPC project could only benefit those where at least the teachers knew how to use computer. But the schools where teachers knew how to use computer were already in the upper class in most third world countries. How to you give computer to village teachers? My sister is a teacher in a school which received computers from govt as part of pilot program. Two years later the teachers were fighting for playing solitaire on it during the period breaks. Not a single student had touched the computer. She herself had just learned how to switch on and switch off and create a doc in Notepad. No printing, no communication, nothing. This was in 2006-2008. Throwing a bunch of PC at students doesn't help them. They will benefit more if you give them money to buy books, notebooks, pencils, pen, chalk, dusters, musical instruments and so on. Almost all school students that I know, they waste more time on electronics gadgets then they use them. I wish the school had zero requirements for any electronics and these students would have done much better.
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.
Even those who arrange and design shrubberies are under considerable economic stress at this period in history.
Part of the give-one-get-one program, so I made a charitable contribution in the process (total cost $400). My daughter was a pre-teen at the time.
The fundamental problem with the OLPC is that it did not have any software that a child, or anyone not into systems hacking perhaps, could or would want to use. Sure there was Python on it, and everything was written in Python and if you wanted just to learn Python it might have a use case. But that was it.
It was more like a hardware demo prototype, than something was useful for anything.
My daughter never used it.
At the same time I bought an EEEPC with Linux on it. $375, roughly the same size. But it was about a million times more useful. My daughter loved it.
Second class citizen of the New Gilded Age
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.
I am the crank attached to my laptop.
Nullius in verba
Leave RMS out of this.
-jcr
The only title of honor that a tyrant can grant is "Enemy of the State."
Netbooks were around MANY years before the OLPC
Well then they weren't called "netbooks":
Google Trends "One Laptop Per Child" vs "Netbook"
and cost about $600 instead of the full price of a Laptop
That is more than 3x the cost of the eventual OLPC. That's 3x fewer kids with laptops.
divided between Ultrabooks or Macbook Airs;
The higher-end ones you were referring to, yes. But the sub-$300 things people were calling "netbooks" are probably closest to Chromebooks today. An Air is pretty darned high-end. Netbooks mostly ran on an Atom and were pretty disappointing even by the standards of the day.
W..w..W - Willy Waterloo washes Warren Wiggins who is washing Waldo Woo.
Deploying renewable energy with battery storage in the developing should be the priority because local electricity generation allows:
1. Reading at night using LED lamps - allows children to educate themselves using books and laptops, their parents can help as they are not working at night
2. Pumping of water via electric pumps so less time and effort is needed to get water
3. Pumped water can irrigate crops so food yields improve
4. Communication devices can be deployed - allows people to become aware of the world around them and science based skills can be learnt
5. Cooking and heating
However, the size of the population needs to be compatible with the available level of resources. Therefore, control of population growth is vital for a good sustainable healthy population.
Remember the world population doubled from 3.9 billion in 1973 to 7.6 billion today in 2018. In 1800 during the industrial revolution the world population was estimated to be 1 billion people. This shows the risk of deploying technologies because natural causes for death are reduced which allows populations to increase.
*carrier not found*
putting the 'B' in LGBTQ+
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.
This was in 2005 when it kicked off. Android tablets weren't a viable option back then
They still aren't. The OLPC is unique and not meant primarily for "western" countries:
- it can run on very little power
- can create mesh network with other OLPCs
- can be used in direct sunlight (special display)
- it can be powered with a hand generator
- it is actually very inexpensive (the online price includes second laptop for a child in developing countries)
- it's OS is designed for learning, sources in python are available easily for any OS component (Linux with Sugar as far as I remember)
I keep seeing major misconception about the OLPC as just another cheap notebook - it is much more then that.
I hope good times will come for the OLPC project.
Drill a well first. Engage one of the available nutrition providers. Then put a roof on the school. Then you can teach.
It's not sexy, but one of the most ignored issues in developing countries isn't obtaining clean water (there are plenty of charities that will drill wells), it's dealing with the other end of the process. Clean water only helps so much when you don't have a safe/sanitary way to poop and otherwise relieve yourself. Adequate outhouses and other forms of sanitation are a critical need.
...si hoc legere nimium eruditionis habes...
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.
In 2005 Around $500 was the starting price for a low end Computer. A starting Laptop would be closer to around $700. (Sans service deals like you have to buy 3 years of MSM internet)
These were crappy system.
A $100 system with an LCD Screen is nearly impossible.
Palm Pilots cost more then $100 and they wouldn't be considered worthy of being called a computer due to its limitation.
Today we can get such options, because of Moors Law, and our actual personal computing usage didn't catch up to it. So we can have a sub $100 tablet that is good enough to browse the web, and write papers.
But back in 2005 you needed some CPU Power to render web pages, and word processing had some features such as fonts and spell check which were nearly required.
If something is so important that you feel the need to post it on the internet... It probably isn't that important.
Palm Pilots cost more then $100 and they wouldn't be considered worthy of being called a computer due to its limitation.
Huh? I had a lot of Palm Pilots and they were quite capable machines, especially for the price. It was a computer. You could program it. One of them had wireless built in. I had two different camera attachments, so it could even take pictures.
But back in 2005 you needed some CPU Power to render web pages,
Have you looked at what it takes to render modern pages? It takes a lot more CPU today that it did in 2005. The CPUs are faster so it doesn't look like it takes more power, but it sure does.
The failure of OLPC was their BOGO that never could deliver. Vaporware. The delivery of "my" OLPC kept getting pushed back AFTER they had pulled the money from my credit card, but they were crowing about how well production was going. It got to the point where the time limit for contesting the charge was about to run out and I cancelled. That's three months for my credit card, so yeah, they promised delivery over and over for almost three months and could never quite pull it off. But they kept telling me all about all the other people who were getting theirs as if that should make me happy.
I ordered the first model OLPC XO-1 at 4:00 AM opening day.
It was exciting, and the give-one-get-one idea made that $400 a reasonably altruistic purchase even though it was supposed to be a $100 computer.
The dual mode (reflective/backlit) screen was great but for a few stuck pixels. I didn't want to burden the project with my nitpicking so I kept it.
I really wanted to like it, and since I was a long-time Cyrix MediaGX processor user I thought that the evolved AMD Geode derivative should have been a performance boost.
It wasn't a slow laptop but the designed-by-committee Sugar desktop software crippled its performance dramatically. It sought to solve a problem nobody had with a solution nobody wanted. I optimized it as much as I could and eventually gave up and put a more conventional X Windows desktop on it and lost interest.
I still own it. The newer models didn't interest me once the Netbooks and Google Chromebooks came out.
Kriston
for these kids.
For WHAT kids? You're making presumptions and it's turning you into an ass. I'm so sorry that your pretend target audience is suffering with more serious issues, but there are plenty of kids out there that got a laptop and it was hella useful and made their life better.
if everything else is solved then sure, go for it.
Utter fucking bullshit.
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
Enjoy science fiction? "Turing Evolved" - AI, Mecha, Androids and rail-gun battles. What more could you want?
How about we solve those problems for everyone on the planet first, instead of putting the cart before the horse?
Because that's fucking BULLSHIT. You're suggesting we HALT all development other than the water, food, and shelter.
FURTHERMORE, congratulations, we HAVE / ARE solving those problems. BOOM.
There are LESS places with LESS people in those situations than there has been for hundreds of years. That's not percentage-based either, I mean absolutely. TIMES ARE GOOD.
Why would you want to bar the poor from having high technology? Why keep them down in the dirt? What would motivate you to even suggest that?
that they spent YEARS trying to design and manufacture extremely low power displays with new (and admittedly more reliable than current stock) light source designs.
Yes those displays were innovative. They were also extremely over-designed and unnecessarily sacrificed readability for power efficiency.
But the big problem is that using current stock displays would have allowed machines on the market instantly and cheaply, while inventing a new technology required years of wasted time and limited manufacturing and source options.
Over the years commodity stock displays overtook the OLPC screen technology in price and in some of the capabilities by extreme amounts anyway. The choice to create a new technology looks ever worse.
To get an idea of how weird the OLPC display was, instead of using light colored by filters and led peak colors, they used prisms that spread light from a white power source. And instead of choosing to use the three narrow color bands that are optimized for the peaks of the human visual system and are the only way to get saturated colors, they instead chose to use 4 color bands and use all the light, not just the peaks. Sure that probably improved the light efficiency by a large factor, but the result was an entirely novel display technology that looked horrible and would have no market outside the OLPC.
Similarly the fact that the display could also work in a reflective mode in black and white was innovative, but was all this worth adding 3 or 4 years to the development time and limiting manufacturing sources and driving up the price?
The choice of LEDs as a light source also made the light source more reliable than what was in use at the time. But stock display technologies eventually caught up with that.