OLPC XO-1: The price of free

Version History

This episode explores the ambitious rise and eventual decline of the One Laptop Per Child (OLPC) initiative and its iconic XO-1 laptop. The

Key takeaways

• Nicholas Negroponte's $100 laptop promise ultimately resulted in a price point closer to $200.
• The XO-1 featured innovative 'rabbit ear' antennas that doubled as protective latches for ports.

Main topics

• One Laptop Per Child (OLPC) initiative
• XO-1 hardware design and features

Notable quotes

What if I could offer you a laptop that would . . . not cost you a dime?

Conclusion

While the XO-1 failed to achieve its massive scale goals, it remains a

Transcript preview

Speaker 7 (0:00) This might be the greatest gadget pitch of all time. What if I could offer you a laptop that would never break, that you immediately understood how to use, that had every feature you needed, that barely even needed a battery, that you could charge yourself, and that wouldn't cost you a dime? That was essentially the pitch behind a laptop called the X01, and it was supposed to change the world forever. From the Virgin Vox Media, this is Virgin History, a show about the best and worst and weirdest and most important products in tech history. I'm David Pierce, and today on the show, we're talking about one laptop per child and the X01. Speaker 5 (0:44) Support for the show comes from Granola. You ever leave a meeting with a greed on next steps only to realize later that no one's quite sure who's responsible for what? That's where Granola can help. Granola is an AI-powered notepad that makes your meeting notes useful. It captures what happens in your meetings and turns it into clean, structured notes with decisions and action items pulled out and made easy to find. Once you try it on a first meeting, it's hard to go without. Try it totally free. Head to granola.ai slash version history. That's granola.ai slash version history to get your time back. Go to granola.ai slash version history and try it on your next call. Speaker 5 (1:29) Support for the show comes from Square. If your business relies on a bunch of disconnected tools to get things done, then it's time to check out Square. You can simplify your operations and bring payments, inventory, staff, scheduling, and online orders into one intuitive system. If you're starting a business or running one that deserves better tools, Square helps you sell, manage, and grow without slowing down. Right now, you can get up to $200 off Square hardware. at square.com slash go slash version history. That's square.com slash go slash version history. Run your business smarter with Square. Get started today. Speaker 7 (2:16) All right, we're back. It's time to talk one laptop per child, the X01, and a weird possible future for computing. Joining me now in the studio, The Verge's Addie Robertson. Hi, Addie. You wrote a bunch of Speaker 1 (2:27) years ago a big, like, definitive one laptop per child story for us. I Speaker 2 (2:32) wrote a big piece on it, yeah. Speaker 1 (2:33) Why was that story interesting to you? Speaker 2 (2:35) I had just a bunch of very intense nostalgia about that era of computing. It happened when I was, before I had entered tech blogging. And so I wanted to see where it was. Speaker 1 (2:44) What was like when you say that era, what do you mean? Speaker 2 (2:47) I mean the just era of small computers in part, but also the era of like this feeling that Linux could change the world. I really wanted one of these things. So, yeah. Speaker 7 (2:59) It was. It was simpler times in a lot of ways. Also joining me, David Amell. Hi, David. What's up? Of The Verge, of Waveform. Of Speaker 1 (3:07) large, wide photographs. Of everything. David and Mel. Have you ever seen this device in front of us before ever in your life? No. Speaker 6 (3:14) Perfect. When you messaged me and said you wanted to do a version history on this, I had no idea what you were talking about. Perfect. Speaker 7 (3:19) So this is why Speaker 1 (3:20) I brought you here. So we have this device in front of us. It is basically a toy of a laptop. It's green. It's dimpled. It has two rabbit ears. It has a green rubber keyboard. I would just like you to just touch this keyboard. It's Speaker 7 (3:38) like a nice Speaker 1 (3:38) membrane, to Speaker 7 (3:39) be honest. Speaker 1 (3:39) Just touch this keyboard for Speaker 7 (3:39) me. Speaker 1 (3:41) It feels gross. It's not good. Speaker 7 (3:42) Yeah, Speaker 1 (3:43) that's bad. Speaker 7 (3:43) Yeah, that's going to come up. This is the OLPC X01. This was supposed to be the computer Speaker 1 (3:50) that saved the world. And the story we're about to tell is both about this particular device, but it's also about the whole idea that you could build a computer that would save the world. And one of the reasons I wanted to have you on this episode in particular... is there is so much in the like overarching thesis behind this organization and this device and the way that they went about putting it out into the world that I'm just curious to get all of your sort of fresh eyes takes on does any of this make any sense? Was any of this a good idea? Should we have ever done any of this? All right, so to start the story, we have to go back to sort of the early 2000s at the MIT Media Lab with two men in particular. Seymour Papert and Nicholas Negroponte. Nicholas Negroponte is sort of the main character of this story. Addy, can you just describe Nicholas Negroponte a little bit? Nicholas Speaker 2 (4:37) Negroponte is founder of the MIT Media Lab, sort of the patron saint of techno-utopianism in some way. early founders of Wired, wrote a column for Wired, was interested in education and specifically something called constructionism, which is where Seymour Papert comes in as well. I'm going to, I think, be mentioning a book called The Charisma Machine a couple times in here. But it points out he basically is from this whole lineage of MIT hackers in the 60s, this idea that the best thing you could possibly do for a kid was to give them access to a computer because a computer is the closest you will ever get to... teaching another thing as a child in some ways that you will program the system and you will learn how to do things and learn how to think and learn how to learn. And this is all based on, in a lot of ways, that there were a bunch of people who came to MIT. They were young. They learned these very first early computers. And so this is just all growing out of that. Speaker 1 (5:34) There's a quote that I can't remember who said it in the course of this whole story of somebody who was like, the thing about computers is that having a computer is the closest thing. to learning how to think or teaching something how to think or teaching yourself how to think that we are capable of doing. Again, this is where we get into, like, does any of this make any sense? Yeah. But it's important to remember this moment in time, right? So it's the early 2000s. We're coming out of the dot-com boom and the dot-com bust. But the idea that computers will fix everything is real and it's everywhere. And this is like the Clinton era sort of... idea of the digital divide, that there are people with access to computers and the internet, and the best way we can lift others out of poverty is to give them access to computers and the internet. These two things are just intrinsically linked in a lot of people's minds at this moment in time. Speaker 2 (6:25) And this has been running since about the 80s, that one of the things that Negroponte is going to talk about as a quote-unquote pilot program is giving kids like Apple IIs. Yeah, then Clinton and the digital divide has come up. This is then also about seven years into Google existing. Facebook is about like... right around the cusp of existing. And you were in kind of the beginning of the thick of the learn to code era. Speaker 1 (6:49) Yeah. Okay. So to your point about the pilot projects, there are sort of two stories Nicholas Negroponte tells all the time. One is about going to Senegal, I believe with Apple IIs, giving them to kids in a school and basically watching them. learn how to use them. He comes back with this as like a cool story. These kids figured it out. They started teaching themselves. He does that thing in Senegal. And then another one in 1999, I believe, where they went to a village in Cambodia, set up a school with like a satellite dish and they had generators and they brought them, I think like Toughbook Panasonic, like big burly laptops and had a very similar experience. So they're like, OK, kids. love these, they figure them out, they like doing this stuff. And so he just continues to validate this theory in his mind that giving computers to kids is kind of all you need to do. And that if you can just do that, if you can just get it in their hands, these kids and their communities will do the rest of the work to do really cool, exciting, important stuff. Speaker 2 (7:43) And I think communities is kind of one of the things that critics at that point and later would kind of fix on that depending on how you read. These people, there is sort of a disdain for traditional schooling and for communities in general. The idea is like you can just drop these somewhere and kids will learn before you have inculcated them into the terrible brick in the wall system of organized schooling, which in lots of developing countries is not great for many other reasons anyway. Speaker 1 (8:14) Yeah, very true. OK, so all this happens and then fast forward to about 2005. Speaker 1 (8:19) Nicholas Negroponte goes to TED, which Addy, you and I were talking about this this morning, was for like a decade just Speaker 7 (8:25) where you go to launch a weird new tech product. For sure. You and I did the Google Glass episode, David, which also starts at a TED talk. There's just so many of these videos of just 18 minutes of some guy gets up and tells you a weird story about the future. And that is precisely what Nicholas Negroponte does here. It's important to remember that at this moment, they've built nothing. They've finished nothing. They have no deals. They have no plans. And he gets up on stage and presents all of this like it is essentially a done deal, finished product, slam dunk, going to be a huge hit. So just like 2026. Absolutely, yes. So at this time, computers were expensive, Speaker 1 (9:02) right? They still are. But most good computers were at least $1,000. And his big promise was he was going to make a $100 laptop. This becomes the phrase for one laptop per child. And he starts to explain how they're going to do that. They're going to find ways to make the screen cheaper. They're going to care a lot about the battery and make it cheaper and easier to recharge. They're going to make something that uses very little power. They're going to make it really durable. All this really great stuff. Like this is the ambition of this thing, right? And he frames it as partly a matter of computing and building something cool and exciting, but also partly as an educational project, right? Like would you say that's fair that he wanted it to be an education project? but kind of talked about it like a computer project. Speaker 2 (9:44) Yeah, talked about it in the way that you talked about stuff at TED, which was definitely a computer project. There's also someone else in the mix here. There's Walter Bender, who is another MIT Media Lab person who's very interested in education. Speaker 1 (9:56) Yeah. So let me just show you, this is 2005. Let me show you the very first prototype of this thing. So this, you'll notice, is nothing like the device that's sitting here on the table. This was the original idea, was you have... keyboard on the bottom with a long wide trackpad. You have a screen up top and one very Speaker 7 (10:15) important thing you'll notice there's a crank on the right side. The crank was going to be how you powered the thing. Speaker 1 (10:20) They were going to build a very low power device that didn't need much power and that because the idea was for this to go to places where there's not a lot of access to electricity you would actually be able to crank the thing to power it yourself. Speaker 6 (10:31) What chipset would even exist in this era that could be powered by a hand crank? Speaker 7 (10:35) Well, Speaker 6 (10:36) we'll never know. Again, Speaker 2 (10:37) this Speaker 7 (10:37) is all, yeah, it's all very sort of theoretical. Speaker 2 (10:39) They Speaker 7 (10:39) start, they wind up with a deal with AMD to actually make the thing. But again, so much of this at the beginning was just an idea. And I think to some extent, I'm sympathetic to that, right? Like he had this big ambition, this big thing that they wanted to do. They Speaker 1 (10:52) needed a lot of. hype in order to get the deals that they were going to need to do this. They needed people to buy into this as a philanthropic project as much as they were going to buy into it as a business. Speaker 2 (11:03) Yeah, I think this is the central question we're going to come up to, which is to what extent was Nicholas Negroponte an effective hype man? And this is the reason the project got it went as well as it did. And to what extent is he a guy who just made promises he could never keep? And that's why the project got undercut. Speaker 7 (11:18) Yes. 100%. Never heard that before. Yeah, what a non-normal tech story, right? Yeah, yeah. So just one way I think that is useful to set up what one laptop Speaker 1 (11:27) per child was trying to do is to just explain they had five principles that govern sort of how they thought about their whole project and how the devices that they were going to make were going to be sort of distributed around the world. This is from a marketing video they made. Let me just play you this chunk of it. Speaker 5 (11:44) We're a nonprofit organization. which makes these kids our mission, not our market. That's why wherever the XO goes, there are five core principles everyone agrees to. First, kids get to keep the laptops. They have to be free to take them home and use them whenever they want. That's kind of the point. Second, we're focused on early education, which means kids about 6 to 12 years old. Third, we have to deal in large numbers of laptops, so whole classrooms and schools get them at the same time, so no one gets left out. Speaker 5 (12:15) Fourth, kids should have a connection to the internet, because there's neat stuff to learn on the internet. Fifth and finally, the XO must include free and open source software. Then the laptop itself can easily grow and adapt with the needs of the child. So, in a nutshell, that's us. An organization that makes a small computer to serve a big cause. Bringing education to children all over the world. With one Speaker 7 (12:37) laptop per child. Simple enough, right? The idea is basically these should belong to these kids. And again, Speaker 1 (12:45) there is this underlying idea that if we just get them to them, they will figure out how to make them valuable. And so this is, again, this is his big promise. Nicholas Negroponte is out there trying to, like you said, drum up interest. He goes to Davos where all the billionaires go to talk about how they're going to save the world and then they fly away in their private jets Speaker 7 (13:04) and makes a similar case. And this actually kind of starts to work, right? He's like, we want to make a – Speaker 1 (13:12) $100 laptop that we can distribute for free to every child in the world in need. If you just look at that sentence, that's very compelling, right? Especially in the early 2000s when there is this incredible tech utopia digital divide thing going on that is like you can see why a bunch of people want to get on board with this. Speaker 2 (13:29) There's also a feature that I think we haven't really mentioned but that was pitched at the time, which is that it was supposed to have a mesh internet system. So the idea was not only this can go to places that don't have. electricity, but it can go to places that barely have internet and you can get one laptop that's within range of something. And then because you have these villages full of children, then it creates this mesh system where they all connect to each other and create a network. And that piggybacks off this one internet connection. And let's not really talk too much about how that works. Speaker 1 (13:57) That's about right. So they go out and they start making deals, right? So they make a deal with AMD. to start making some chips. AMD was also working on low-cost computers. They get this whole sort of consortium of tech companies involved in the one laptop per child movement. What exactly involvement means varies in a lot of ways, but it's a lot of people just sort of broadly supporting this idea. And then they set out, again, I cannot overstate the extent to which they have still not made a product at this point. They go out and start trying to make deals to sell mass quantities of these to countries around the world. You remember one of the principles is we're only going to do large deals because we want everyone to have one. I Speaker 2 (14:36) believe he says screw you, go to the back of the line if you want smaller numbers. Speaker 1 (14:40) Less than a million. His line at the beginning was if you're not going to buy more than a million, we're not interested. The ambition of this thing is just absolutely out of control. Speaker 2 (14:50) Screw you is a direct quote, by the way. Speaker 1 (14:52) Yes. Speaker 3 (14:52) When people say, well, we'd like to do 3,000 or 4,000 in our country to see how it works. Screw you. Go to the back of the line and someone else will do it. And then when you figure out that this works, you can join as well. Speaker 1 (15:04) Again, Nicholas Tegrapponte, fascinating guy. So they go out. This becomes kind of a phenomenon, right? Like the New York Times runs a headline about how this is the laptop that will save the world. The BBC goes out and does a whole sort of feature on what this looks like in one of the pilot Speaker 7 (15:19) programs in Nigeria. They start talking to countries around the world and... That immediately becomes pretty complicated, I think, for a couple of reasons. One is Speaker 1 (15:30) that the idea of a guy in the United States building a product in Asia and then giving it to children in Africa is just politically complicated for a bunch of reasons. It's culturally Speaker 7 (15:42) complicated for a bunch of reasons. But also, there are a lot of questions about is this actually the best way to help people? But there are a lot of people who Speaker 1 (15:50) believe maybe that's not it. And there was this great... A moment with a Nigerian education minister from a BBC news story who I think put this really nicely. Let me just play this for you. Speaker 3 (16:00) A year ago, the Nigerian government talked of ordering a million laptops, but a new education minister appears sceptical. What is going to be the essence of introducing one laptop per child? Speaker 3 (16:15) Where they don't have seats to sit down and learn. Where they don't have uniforms to wear to school. Where they don't have facilities. I Speaker 1 (16:23) feel like that's a perfectly fair question, right? Like, is a laptop what we need when the kids don't have seats to sit on? Is a sentence I've thought a lot about in prepping for this episode. And it's something that comes up a lot. But I just want to have that as the background as we get to this device that they start to make. But they had some truly wild ideas about this being like an incredible... versatile, all-in-one, do-everything-for-everybody kind of screen. But eventually they get away from that and they come to what turned into this device in front of us, which is the One Laptop per Child X01. Speaker 2 (16:54) If you're thinking this seems a lot like mid-2000s design, you know who designed it? Speaker 7 (17:00) Yves Behar. Yes. Speaker 2 (17:01) The Speaker 7 (17:01) most mid-2000s designer of all mid-2000s designers. He was not the first. There was another design firm that did a lot of the work, but Yves and his... Team came in later and did a lot of the stuff. And so they come in and they try to build this device. Speaker 1 (17:15) And I think this gadget as an Speaker 7 (17:17) answer to the questions being posed Speaker 1 (17:20) by this whole project is really fascinating. So, David, Speaker 7 (17:25) you've never seen this thing before. Never seen it. You can pick it up and play with it. Okay. Play with it while I explain to you what this device is. This is the OLPC X01. You have just discovered the main feature of it. Tablet mode? So it has Speaker 1 (17:37) a 7.5-inch screen. And the display wound up being one of the biggest sort of technical challenges here because, A, a screen is almost always the most expensive part in any gadget. And finding a screen that they could make that was durable and cheap and easy to make at scale was very important. They wound up building one that they could manufacture for $35, which was more Speaker 7 (18:00) than they wanted but less than most screens. And it has two different modes. It's actually frontlit and backlit. So you can have Speaker 1 (18:07) it in. normal laptop mode and it's in color but you can turn the backlight all the way down flip it around like you're doing put it down and it becomes an e-reader and it's it's in black and white it's not full e-ink but it is it's near that kind of readability and low light and simplicity of use and their idea is you just also found the d-pad and the buttons that like you would hold it just like this and it actually becomes very much a reading device as much as anything else. So there's like an early Kindle thing happening. Speaker 2 (18:40) It's also a game pad? It Speaker 1 (18:41) is also a game pad. There were some basic, they were trying to do a lot of educational software and games and you could do that on here too. Wow. I kind of want one of these Speaker 6 (18:49) today. Speaker 7 (18:50) Right? Yeah. This thing is like a little gaming tablet is actually kind of rad. Speaker 6 (18:54) Like all the two-in-one laptops we have right now don't have a gaming pad on it. Right. Speaker 1 (18:58) And I do love you just instinctively figured out how to hold it like a little game. It's a little Speaker 6 (19:02) heavy. I mean, I don't know if kids would be able to necessarily like hold this for a long period of time, but it's pretty, it feels innovative, honestly. Speaker 1 (19:10) David, while you play with this, can I read you some of the specs Speaker 7 (19:12) of this device? Please. It had a 500 megahertz AMD processor. Okay. Blisteringly Speaker 1 (19:17) fast. That's good enough. It had 128 megabytes of RAM, which today would cost like $60,000. It had a gigabyte of flash storage. It didn't have an actual spinning hard drive because it's a thing that breaks really easily. So it had a actual gigabyte of flash storage. Expensive storage. Speaker 7 (19:35) It was expensive storage. And I remember it became kind of controversial that there was no hard drive. Why would it be controversial? Speaker 2 (19:42) You have to basically just, once you account for the size of the operating system, remove things you're using as you're done using them so that you can put files on it. Yeah, I think a gigabyte is very small. It's the main controversy. That's fair enough. Speaker 7 (19:58) It had no disk drives, which was also a controversial choice at the time. So much Speaker 1 (20:02) software came on disks. It had Wi-Fi, which was a big deal. One very cool little architectural thing about this device is... These two rabbit ears are Wi-Fi antennas. They also exist to protect the ports on either side. And they're the latching mechanism. Just a really clever little bit of design. So if you want to open it up, you flip up the rabbit ears and then you open up the computer. That's amazing. It's really clever. It Speaker 6 (20:29) also forces you to make the antennas more, you Speaker 1 (20:32) know. You had to put the antennas up to use the thing. That's cool. Just a bunch of very clever little features. There Speaker 2 (20:39) are apparently repair screws inside the handle. Speaker 1 (20:41) Yes. So it was designed initially to be very repairable. You can open up the thing basically with just a screwdriver. It got a little wonky over time because one way they found to save money was to make a couple of the parts more proprietary and harder to take apart, which undoes a bunch of the idea. A theme of this device is that they probably shouldn't have said the phrase $100 laptop so many times, and it ran them into a lot of trouble. Speaker 2 (21:07) Should probably also have not said we're going to throw it across the