origins

Friday, August 29, 2008
Computers

OLPC Origin: Bittersweet Success and Future of the XO Laptop

4:40AM Wilson Rothman | When I met with Nicholas Negroponte not long ago, he laughed at the coverage he’d received through the past few years, including our own portrayal of Intel chairman Craig Barrett and him as Beavis and Butthead. Far more hurtful have been the admonitions of his own former staffers who feel he has mismanaged the OLPC project. Nearly every one of the original staff had abandoned the project by 2008, often in disgust. But Negroponte remains stalwart: “My elephant skin is the thickness of steel,” he told me. Perhaps his resistance to criticism has been one of the project’s fatal flaws.
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Thursday, August 28, 2008
Computers

OLPC Origins: US and Taiwan’s Hardware Lovechild

2:30AM Wilson Rothman | digg_skin = 'compact'; digg_bgcolor = '#f1f8fa'; digg_url = 'http://digg.com/hardware/OLPC_Origins_US_and_Taiwan_s_Hardware_Lovechild'; In November of 2005, Nicholas Negroponte and his OLPC CTO Mary Lou Jepsen travelled to Tunisia for the UN-sponsored World Summit on the Information Society, where they were able to present a “working” US$100 laptop concept to Kofi Annan, UN secretary general. No longer did the machine rely on that pop-up rear-projection display; it was smaller, made of green plastic, and had a crank for the kids to work—for 10 straight minutes per hour of use—when they had no other access to electricity. It was a vast improvement over that January’s pup-tent rear-projection laptop, hampered only by the fact that it was an absolute fake.
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Wednesday, August 27, 2008
Computers

Secret Origin of the OLPC: Genius, Hubris and the Birth of the Netbook

2:00AM Wilson Rothman | From the moment Nicholas Negroponte showed off his US$100 laptop concept at the Davos world economic summit in January 2005, it was as if the tech world’s supermoguls were glowering down on him in judgment. Over the course of the year, Craig Barrett, Michael Dell, Bill Gates and Steve Jobs weighed in, privately declining support and in some cases publicly disparaging the idea. The naysayers had a point. The mockup Negroponte was toting around that winter was one ugly baby. It aimed to reach the US$100 price tag by having a slower processor, a skinnier internal drive, a smaller body and let’s not forget that tent-like rear-projection screen that made it look like the conceptual heir to the pop-top VW Vanagon camper. But after three and a half years, Negroponte’s crazy idea hasn’t only produced the XO, a real laptop co-developed and manufactured by the world’s largest notebook maker, it’s also become a product most of Negroponte’s opponents are now copying. After interviewing Negroponte himself, along with his original CTO Mary Lou Jepsen, designer Yves Behar, advanced technologies VP Michail Bletsas and others, we can explain how this proposed global humanitarian effort may in fact be more successful as a revolution in hardware design, and how OLPC will continue to influence the hardware you buy, even if you never score an actual XO. More »
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