- This is the "$100
Laptop," which costs $200. What?! Don't worry. This
will all make sense soon. And whether you know it or
not, this little green guy altered the tech world
you're living in right now. (upbeat music) Hey everyone, how are you all doing? If you're new here, welcome.
My name is Krazy Ken. And this is the OLPC
XO-1 AKA the $100 laptop. It flips, it swivels, it's green, it's just a cool looking computer, but the computer is just
a tiny part of the story. OLPC stands for One Laptop per Child and they were an ambitious charity on a quest to change the world,
and I highly respect that. So let's see how well that worked out. But first we need to
know how it all started. This is Seymour Papert. He was a media lab professor at the Massachusetts
Institute of Technology, and he was one of the
founders of constructionism, an educational theory that states children can
learn much more effectively when they're able to build things. Seymour was also one of the inventors of the logo programming language, which was designed for children. It was released in 1966 and went on to play a key
role in children's education in the early days of
the personal computer. Its popularity grew
significantly in the 1980s and it ran on multiple platforms. Now, there was another person who observed Seymour's
constructionism theory, Nicholas Negroponte. Nicholas co-founded the
MIT Media lab in 1985 with Jerome B. Wiesner. This is where Professor
Seymour Papert worked. 20 years later in January, 2005, Nicholas was about to form the non-profit, One Laptop per Child, and the organization's roots
were based on constructionism. OLPC's mission was to
be an education project, not a laptop project. Their goal was to provide
children around the world with new opportunities
to explore, experiment, and express themselves. That may sound a little nebulous, but OLPC would achieve this by providing each school age
child in a developing country, their very own laptop, and these kids would keep the laptops. OLPC wasn't just donating some
computers to some classrooms, each kid would get to keep
their very own computer, but there was just one
little problem, money. In 2005, laptops were
relatively much more expensive than they are now. You typically couldn't get a good machine for less than a thousand dollars, and there were no Chromebooks
or iPads back then. So Nicholas had to get the price down, but first he had to gain
awareness for this project. Thankfully, Nicholas had some success doing something similar in the past. He helped bring computers
to developing areas such as Dakar in 1982
and Cambodia in 2002. So why not? Let's do it again. On January 26th, 2005, Nicholas spoke at the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland. Oh, not on some big stage or anything, that's what I originally pictured. No, it was in the hallways. John Markoff of the New York Times wrote about Nicholas's laptop pitch, and he said Nicholas didn't
get a more official platform at the World Economic Form because the form was
prioritizing other inequalities. They weren't focusing much
on the digital divide. - We have 10,000 children
who die every single day, 10,000 because they don't have
this clean glass of water. Nicholas brought a mock-up
of the soon to be computer along with him and he
pitched this new idea for a $100 laptop. And overall it was pretty well received, but like with anything
new, there will be skeptics and there will be critics. Some attendees complain that charitable efforts should focus on clean water in real schools. Bill Gates even told reporters, "Geez, get a decent computer where we can actually read the text." It's okay, Bill, it's just a prototype. It's barely even a prototype, just give it a little bit of time. But on the plus side, companies
believed in Nicholas's idea and he was backed by big
names, AMD, Google, Red Hat, and Nortel, just to name a few. Quantum computers also backed the project and would go on to manufacture the laptop. And in 2006, Marvell would join too and soon their chips would
help power the laptops. The forum ran from
January 26th to the 30th and in the middle on the 28th, Nicholas officially started the
One Laptop per Child project and colleagues from the
media lab joined him, Joe Jacobson and Seymour Paper. Joe was the co-founder of E Ink Corp, which sounds like a good
guy you want to know if you're making a
product that has a screen. Later in the year, Nicholas
met with Mary Lou Jepsen, who just joined the Media
Lab faculty in April, 2005. Talk about good timing. She co-founded the
MicroDisplay Corporation, so Nicholas et al picked her brain to see how can we make a good display that fits the design of this laptop and fits within the price. As the team worked hard on
the physical laptop itself, Nicholas traveled the
globe to drum up attention for this project and more
countries were getting on board. We really believe we can
make literally hundreds of millions of these machines available to children around the
world, Nicholas said, and it's not just $100,
it's going to go lower. I was actually surprised that he said that because I already thought
$100 was super ambitious, but to go even lower,
Nicholas is pretty optimistic, maybe too optimistic. In November, 2005 at the World Summit on the Information Society in Tunis, Nicholas and United
Nations Secretary General, Kofi Annan presented an
updated prototype of the laptop named Green Machine and it captured the interest
of more journalists. This new prototype featured a hand crank to power the laptop, which was first demoed
on September 28th, 2005 at MIT's Emerging Technologies Conference. And according to Morgan Ames
book, the Charisma Machine, when Annan demoed the
crank, it promptly broke off in front of everybody. By the end of 2005, OLPC
gained the attention of several foreign countries and Massachusetts Governor, Mitt Romney. They were all planning to deploy laptops to millions of children. The project even captured
Steve Jobs attention. He offered free copies of
Apple's Macs 10 operating system for the OLPC, but Seymour
declined the offer because he wanted an entirely
open source solution. Now it's time for the
next world economic forum on January 26th, 2006. And remember one year ago, Nicholas was wandering the halls pitching this $100 laptop idea, but a lot has changed since then. At the forum, the United Nations
Development Program announced it would back the laptop with the aim of selling 1
million units by the end of 2007. So the momentum was growing. At this point, the laptop
didn't have an official name, but it was still commonly
referred to as the $100 laptop. That's a bold name with a bold promise. And when you toss that
name around for a year, you start to set certain expectations and hopefully they can be met. I think you know where
I'm going with this. Yeah, the price never got that low. But before we dive into
the price some more, let's talk about the name. In 2006, OLPC changed the name
too, the Children's Machine, which was also the name of a
book that Seymour Papert wrote. Coincidence? I think not. In 2007, the official final
name for the laptop was XO. The name was based off the logo, which was designed by Michael (indistinct) at the Pentagram Design Firm. And it looks like a happy kid, you know, with a head and arms, you
know, I see it, it works. You know, now I see the singular
logo and I can't unsee it. Okay, so now let's talk
about that price situation. Walter Bender was the president of OLPC and he and the team worked very
hard to get the price down. They actually got it down to $130, getting pretty close to a hundred, but they cut so many corners,
the laptop barely worked, so they had to make some adjustments. Ultimately, the final price was $188, which is obviously above 100. In Nicholas's defense, he did
say it's a floating price. We have a target of $100 by 2008, but probably it will be 135, maybe 140. We are promising that
the price will go down. After a pilot program
and some more testing, Uruguay became the first country
to place an official order, and this was in October. They ordered 100,000 laptops.
So this was a big step. And on November 6th, mass
manufacturing officially began. Now you couldn't just
waltz into a Circuit City and buy one of these things. They were sold to governments and then they were
distributed appropriately. But after mass production started, OLPC started a donation program
where you could donate $200 to give a laptop to a
child via xogiving.org. And on November 12th, they launched a Give one, Get one program. If you donate $399, OLPC
will give a laptop to a child and ship one to you or
to your cat, I suppose. The program lasted until
the end of the year and it raised $35 million. I think that's a great start. So that brings us to the
physical product itself, and thanks to the Betty
Crocker Gushers giveaway, I have an XO-1 right here. No, I'm just kidding, I
didn't win the giveaway, I just bought it on eBay. We'll also cover this
laptop's battery life, which is really important
because in some use cases you may not always have electricity and sometimes you might find
yourself in a similar situation and that's why it's always nice to carry a power bank with you. And I like this SHARGE Power Bank because honestly it just
looks freaking cool. I love Clear Tech. SHARGE made the world's first
transparent power banks, and this is the Shargeek 100. 25,600 milliamp hour capacity, 100-watt fast charging in and out. You can charge the whole
thing in just 90 minutes. It has a display so
you can adjust settings and monitor temperatures. And it has two USB-C
ports, one USB-A port, and a DC port with adjustable voltage. You can charge almost
anything like phones, tablets, laptops, you name it. But Ken, is it airline safe? Yes, it actually says
right here, airline safe. And here's another cool
SHARGE product, SHARGE Disk. It's a tiny M.2 SSD
enclosure with a cooling fan. It uses USB-C for data transfer up to 10 gigabits per
second, and it's cable-less, but you can use a cable if you want to. It has a right protection switch and with the included
case, it's IP54 rated for six and a half foot drops. So go ahead and click the link
down below in the description to get your own SHARGE products right now. Okay, let's take a closer look
at this laptop's hardware. The XO is green and white, and the colors were inspired
by the Nigerian flag according to ZDNET Asia. Now look, it even has a handle too. Oh dang, I just remembered
this is the same laptop, Strong Bad, used. He must have donated. Good for him! The shell was built to be child friendly, which inherently means durable two-millimeter-thick
plastic is a must. The design is rain resistant and can survive five foot drops. But don't take my word for it. - Try doing that with
one of the other laptops. Okay, and it's always gonna work. It seems to be working still. - Yes, it does work.
- It does work. There's also no vents, which helps prevent water and
debris from getting inside and there's no fans or
mechanical hard discs. Fewer moving parts means
potentially fewer failure points. The keyboard is constructed
of this green membrane and while the small keys
and lack of tactility might be annoying to us adults, for kids, this is maybe a better solution because it prevents dust
and debris and spills from getting underneath the keyboard. Beneath the keyboard is
an Alps electric touch pad with left and right click XO buttons, and there's two resistive
pads for a stylus, but an official stylus
accessory was never released and in the next XO revision, the resistive pads were
completely removed. The top and bottom plastics are textured with a bump pattern. And here's a subtle touch. Closer to the handle
reveals an XO logo pattern. The large XO logo on the
back was also printed in numerous color combinations so kids could tell their laptops apart. The rubber flip up ears on the sides of the screen
serve three functions. They latched the laptop
closed, they covered the IO and they house the wifi antennas. They can be positioned
upwards to extend the range. On the left side is the AC barrel jack, USB and audio in and out. On the right side are two more USB ports and underneath is an SD card slot, which is kind of hard to
get to, but it's there. On the display bezel, we
have a camera and microphone, speakers, a D-Pad, a screen
rotate button, the power button and game buttons. And the D-Pad and game
buttons come in handy when you flip the screen
around and lay it flat. Now you've transformed your XO
into a tablet slash e-reader, and here's where that Mary
magic comes into play. The team built a seven and a
half inch two-in-one display. The first mode shows
color and uses a backlight and power consumption is
only 0.2 to one watts. The second mode uses a
transflective panel for light. The backlight turns off and the color switches to black and white. This mode works better
in bright conditions and it draws much less
power, 0.1 to 0.2 watts. It's great for reading and the XOs display
controller chip and RAM enables the display to remain live while the processor is suspended. The system regularly turns
on and off components on the motherboard to help save power, and this rapid switching is
imperceptible to the user. And speaking of power, the removable battery
is built into the base. It's a 3.1 amp hour battery,
and according to Linux Today, it can last around six
hours on a full charge. It's a good balance of form and function. A smart guy must have led the design. Oh yeah, it's Yves Behar
on the Fuseproject. They make some cool looking stuff. After the XO, they went on to design many more products including the Jambox and something I made an episode
about recently, the OUYA. Now let's go inside and look at the specs. The bezel display and
back panel are held in with a total of 12 Phillips screws. Then there were three more Phillips screws holding this metal shield/heat
spreader on the motherboard. Inside we have an AMD Geode LX processor clocked at 433 megahertz, one gigabyte of flash memory for storage, 256 megabytes of RAM
and here's our DCON chip and RAM we were talking about earlier. And here we see Marvell helping us out with a camera and flash enabler chip, which helps drive the
camera NAND flash storage and the SD card interface. They also made the wireless chips. The XO supports 802.11b/g wifi
and 802.11s mesh networking, which means XOs can work together to provide internet access to other XOs. The feature was buggy to say the least, and users complained. And in the next revision of the hardware, OLPC didn't even bother building in the mesh networking feature. Now when you're in a developing country, you may not always have
access to electricity, which is why OLPC tried
the hand crank thing, but we all know how well that worked out. So the team worked really hard to get the peak energy
consumption down to five watts and only one watt when idle. However, in my testing,
my XO peaked at 9.1 watts. I'm not sure why there was
that discrepancy there, but I still think that's pretty low. But if you didn't have an outlet, the XO can be powered
by a pole cord generator or a solar panel. So that's the XO-1 hardware. Now let's take a look at the software and much like the hardware, the software was heavily
customized to fit the goals for children's education. Keeping the open source
software goal in mind, the XO runs a slim version of
Fedora Linux, a Linux distro. Running on top of the OS
is an education-focused desktop environment named Sugar. Walter Bender led the development and Pentagram helped design the UI. I'm not sure why OLPC
chose the name Sugar, maybe it's just because kids love sugar. Okay, funny enough, I just
checked inside of Morgan's book and she said something similar. Great minds think alike. Anyway, when you boot it
up, you get a startup sound. (tech music) I love that. So sugar's fundamentals
are a little bit different than a typical desktop
environment we're used to. There's no applications per se. Programs are named activities
and when they're used, they're recorded into the journal, which is a core part of sugar. Everything the user
does throughout the day is automatically recorded into the journal and there's no traditional
desktop with overlapping windows. Instead, all activities
occupy the full screen and your favorite activity
icons are arranged in a circle in the home view, depending on the build,
sometimes a spiral. You can switch to freeform mode
to place the icons anywhere and to see all installed activities, you can click the list button. The home view is the third layer or view of the operating system. Sugar has four of them, and you can switch between the four views with these circular
buttons on the keyboard. Zooming all the way out gives
you the neighborhood view, which shows other XO users
and internet access points including mesh networks. Zooming in gives you the group view, which shows your friends,
then the home view, then your current activity. The frame button instantly
displays several features and it's accessible in any activity. From here, you can view your clipboard, change your zoom level,
switch between activities, alt tab also works, see your buddy list and check status indicators. You can also access the frame by moving your cursor into a corner. And when typing, you can
use the alt graphic key to enter special characters
from the keyboard. And this next part really surprised me. If you press function space bar, the source code for the activity you're in displays right in front of you. Off the top of my head, I don't
know if any other computer that does that, like that's pretty cool. They're really focusing on open source. There's some other keys on here, which according to the manual, were saved for future releases, but I don't know, I can't
get them to do anything. There's lots of built-in activities and you can also download
more from the library. On my XO, I have music playing
activities, a web browser, drawing, Python programming,
physics simulation, games, and probably my favorite, speak. - Shall we play a game? - Building on Seymour's
constructionism ideas, these activities help children
learn by building things. Heck, you can even program
in logo if you want, and the turtle is still there,
just like in the old days. Maybe you've had enough sugar for the day, so if you need to, you can switch to gnome and have more of a traditional
desktop environment and then to switch back, just
double click the sugar icon. For security, XO used a system developed by Ivan Krstić named BITFROST. It was Password-less and if a laptop didn't check
in with the school via wifi or a USB dongle, the
laptop would lock itself. BITFROST also runs activities in a sandbox so they can't see other
programs, system paths or user documents without
direct user intervention. So that's the XO software. And for what it's worth, you can still download versions
of sugar from sugarlabs.org. The activities library
is also still online and OLPC still offers images
of the operating system that are specifically
made for their hardware. But you know, like with anything, there's limitations especially
on first generation products, but those were small issues
in the grand scheme of things. The bigger issues were with OLPC's mission and the execution. Just like earlier, critics argued that the mission ignored
bigger problems in the world like food, water, and shelter. Is this a bad time to
mention I donate a laptop to someone in need every
time I hit a million views? You know, these criticisms
kind of remind me of that donkey comic. No matter what you do, even
if it's with great intentions, like you're always gonna have critics. Other issues stemmed from
the lack of maintainability. OLPC was accused of just
giving every kid a laptop and then that's it. Where's the tech support? Sure, the system was easy to open, but that doesn't mean you
can repair it properly. First off, you have to
know how to repair it, not just how to open it
up and you need the parts. Some of the parts were proprietary, so if there was a hardware problem, fixing them would not be practical. And that's what happened over the months. There were issues, there
were hardware problems and the usage declined. There were also logistical issues. For example, Peru committed
to 2.2 million laptops, but as of a 2009 report,
only 350,000 were delivered. And unfortunately, problems like this contributed to the lower sales numbers. And I know it's still
early in the whole process, but when you toss around
the word millions a bunch, just like with the price,
you set certain expectations. 2007 sales totaled around
600,000, which is 400,000 short of the United Nations 2007 projection, and it doesn't look like they're on track to hit their year two goal
of 100 to 150 million, which Nicholas projected at
MIT world in September, 2005. Son of a beach ball, a
hundred to 150 million, that is a really optimistic number. At this point, some
countries started backing out and competition was starting to heat up. And to understand that a little bit more, we need to rewind a bit. In March, 2007, Intel shipped their first
generation Classmate PC. This kind of pissed Nicholas off. He accused intel of trying
to destroy the non-profit and to make things even more awkward, Intel joined OLPC on July
13th of the same year. Yeah, that relationship
lasted less than five months. Nevertheless, before the XO even shipped, it was gonna have to brace for competition and it didn't stop with just Intel. While the first XO was
still under development, ASUS revealed the Eee PC, which gave birth to the netbook boom. The first Eee PC would go on
to sell five million units in the first year, despite costing twice as much as the XO at $399. Back to early 2008, Nicholas tried to give the XO
some competitive advantages. Him and the team toyed with the idea of running Windows XP on the laptop but ultimately that plan did network out and Walter actually left OLPC. Don't worry, he founded Sugar Labs so he can still maintain sugar as a separate independent
open source project. He wasn't the only one to leave though. Mary and Ivan also left in early 2008. And Mary did what's
called a pro-gamer move. She founded the for
profit company Pixel Qi and they made low power
displays, which OLPC needed. Don't worry, they both signed
across license agreements so they're getting along
just fine, on paper anyway. So numbers were being missed and people were leaving the organization. Things were looking a little bleak, but surely things can't get any worse- - The signs were everywhere, but now it's official
we are in a recession. - Most significant financial
crisis in the post-war period. - The Dow plunged nearly 680 points today. - But the news could only get worse. - Oh yeah... the housing bubble. These economic challenges eventually led to the death of the XO-2, which was a dual screen
tablet concept priced at $75. And I don't wanna blame
the economy entirely for this next part, but I'm
pretty sure it didn't help. On November 17th, 2008, OLPC ran another give one get one program, but it generated less than
10% of the 2007 program from only one year earlier. In the midst of these challenges, Nicholas had some serious thinking to do. On January 7th, 2009, he
began restructuring OLPC. He cut the staff in
half and not literally, 'cause that would be bloody, I mean he downsized the staff by 50%. He slashed the budget from
12 million to 5 million and he split OLPC into two entities. The new OLPC Foundation
handled hardware development. While the OLPC Association continued the distribution
of existing hardware, maybe this restructure could save them. OLPC wasn't calling it quits
yet. Progress isn't linear. There is peaks and valleys and OLPC still believed in their mission and it looks like Nicholas did too 'cause otherwise he
wouldn't try to save it. So what's next? XO 1.5.
That's what's next. The XO 1.5 released in January, 2010. It replaced the AMD Geode
with a faster VIA C7-M clocked at varied speeds from 400 megahertz to one gigahertz. The RAM was also upgraded to one gigabyte and the flash memory was
upgraded from one gigabyte to four gigabytes of storage, which was now an internal micro SD card, so it could be upgraded. In March, 2012, the XO 1.75 was released, and the biggest new
feature is an 800 megahertz Marvell Armada 610, which
is an ARMv7 processor. Previous XO processors
used the X86 architecture, which is typically more hungry. This ARM-based architecture
only drew two watts, and I've seen various
prices for the XO 1.75, but it never got down to $100
in case you're wondering. At CES 2012, OLPC showed the
XO-3, which was a tablet. Essentially, it was a redo of the XO-2 without the dual screen form factor, but it was canceled in November in favor of the next XO laptop, and I'm sure you can
guess what the name was. That's right. XO-5. Just
kidding! It was XO-4. Released in March of 2013, according to Engadget,
the XO-4 was available for $206 per unit with a minimum
order quantity of 10,000. The XO-4 had some souped up internals and a micro HDMI port but the most exciting feature
was the optional touchscreen. The XO-4 touch used infrared technology. Yeah, it could only track
two fingers at a time, but I guess that's okay for the price. And on July 16th, OLPC
launched the Android-based XO tablet for $149, but there was still one more
laptop up OLPC's sleeve, but we're about three
years away from that. On March 11th, 2014, OLPC News reported that the OLPC Foundation
had quietly disbanded, but the association continues to operate. In 2015, it was acquired by
the Zamora Terán Foundation and it now operates as OLPC Incorporated. At this time, OLPC was actually
working on a new laptop with a bigger screen and faster internals. And one of the reasons was
manufacturers were saying, "Hey, the parts are
getting harder to find." And it launched in 2016 and here it's. Yeah, it's kind of transitioning to a traditional laptop look. And they called it NL3. I'm not sure where the
name actually comes from, but there you go, NL3. Shortly before the NL3 launch in 2015, OLPC's total laptop shipments reached nearly 3 million children
around the world. The OLPC website today
currently says over 3 million. So perhaps that number
slowly grew over time. Was the sales number as big
as originally hyped? No. Was the price ever as low
as a hundred dollars? No. These utopian predictions caused some complications
for the organization, but ultimately I still think 3 million is a really good achievement. OLPC today still focuses
on fundraising efforts, and in 2022, they changed
the meaning of their name to represent Operation
Learning Project and Computer. Over OLPC's life, people came and went. Mary originally left in
2008 to form Pixel Qi and she eventually formed OpenWater. Ivan went on to work for Apple in 2008. Apparently he achieved
this by emailing Steve Jobs at 1:46 in the morning. Talk about being a go-getter. And Nicholas is an angel investor, and I believe Nicholas has
pushed for a 100 to $200 laptop plus the competition that
came out around the same time helped push down prices
throughout the industry. And shortly after this
whole XO thing started, we saw iPads and
Chromebooks hit the market. A lot more affordable
and accessible devices were becoming available. In June, 2016, during an interview on Martha's Vineyard Arts
and Ideas, Nicholas said, "We estimate that there are
about 50 million laptops in the hands of kids who wouldn't have otherwise gotten them. Not because we made those laptops, but because we pulled the prices down." And I agree, I believe this
tiny white and green laptop and the countless employees and volunteers who helped make it happen
had rippling effects through the industry. But what about Seymour Papert, the man behind constructionism, which all of this was based on? Sadly, we lost Seymour on July
31st, 2016 at the age of 88. But the legacy he left on computers and education is timeless. And I swear I did not plan this. But a couple weeks before I
started writing this episode, and before I knew anything about Seymour, I internally scheduled the
release date for February 29th, which happens to be Seymour's birthday. Happy birthday, Seymour! Thank you to Nicholas and the team for creating such a noble cause and thank you for coming
along with me today and learning about it. It was a lot of fun. Catch the crazy and pass it on. (upbeat music) Guess what activity I just
downloaded? Can you believe it? Reversi!
