Here in Uruguay it was everywhere since it was a government backed initiative, we called them Ceibalitas because the project was called Plan Ceibal. I was one of the first kids to get one, the rollout started in my city. Never got any revisions but I know of kids that did, there was a blue one too which ran a standard build of linux if I recall correctly! We never used it as a learning tool in class but I know teachers had to go to computer courses to try and give them some use. A lot of local game devs released games for the XO, usually paid for by brands who wanted to make a game with their brand on it, but there was also some government backed videogames which focused more on the learning side, maths and history were the main ones.
With an average eye cue of 96, they might have actually done some good there. But rest assured the do-gooders were NOT targeting you. They were targeting countries were the average eye cue is in the high 60s to low 70s (yes, there are many) or India where it is 83. People REALLY want to believe eye cue is wrong or fake or entirely a product of the environment, but there is no one measure of people more accurate and with more predictive power than this simple number. People also have no idea how well these figures are studied and how even the US government keeps a running tally of what jobs require what eye cue score range and how no amount of training can make up for the deficit in eye cue. (youtube will autodelete my comment if it contains the correct spelling). Conversely, no amount of lack of training (with a few exceptions requiring a LOT of acquired knowledge) will keep high eye cue people from performing well at a job after an initial period where he learns the job. One reason so many of us now go to college is because the government has made eye cue testing prospective employees de-facto illegal. In MANY, MANY jobs, a college degree is just a proxy for eye cue.
Quick fact add: The screen was only 1200 pixels wide with backlight off thanks to a neat prism effect. Light coming in would use the red/green/blue pixels as individual shades of grey. With light coming from the backlight they show as RGB. Really neat design.
Yeah, the screen was 1200 x 900 pixels, but a color dot was actually three pixels (RGB). It was actually difficult to establish a screen resolution equivalence in RGB mode. The best conversion I was familiar with was an effective resolution of around 700 x 500 (resolution divided by square root of 3). However, that was still just a convention, you had 1200 x 900 resolution, but only color information at a third of that.
It was great that it was perfectly readable in direct sunlight. Was a neat device overall. The company that made the transflective displays tried to enter the general market too but ended up folding sadly
@@frankdogui7195 It was designed to be efficient and practical, and most importantly, did not glow an obnoxious bright blue like all consumer electronics of the early 2000s.
This was such an ambitious project, and I'm glad to see that it got out to a not insignificant number of children. We need more efforts like this today.
Smartphones have opened up a big gap for the developing world. It's not as useful as a laptop but far cheaper and has opened up the internet and computing for millions (if not billions) of people.
@Zaydan Naufal Problem with phones are its form factor, its tiny screen and limited productivity use. But then phones can be laptops if plugged in with laptop-liks accessory. Sadly this feature is still exclusive among flaghsips. Well at least there are cheap tablets these days.
Got one, got one of the blue as well, i remember making a car that followed a color line around a track(by shamelessly ripping off the logic of another project, dont remember what program it was made on tho) I also remember spending 99.9% of my time using the blue one in linux, playing wine games and listening to "Numb" and "In The End" by Linking park (i was in high school) Tbh they where amazing machines even tho i hated how underpowered they where (the blue one tho played quake just fine in wine), but now i can appreciate them for what they meant to be Sadly all their capabilities were wasted by my teachers never using them at all, for pretty much anything They just become videogame consoles and media consumption machines for the kids who got them, wich it was cool lmao but not really their intended purposes, although i can see some linux fans growing up with the blue one Contenxt: im from Uruguay and i got both via the "Ceibal Plan" like the other guy in the comments
"Sadly all their capabilities were wasted by my teachers never using them at all, for pretty much anything" When I was watching this I was thinking, "That seems nice and all, but the teachers still have to learn how to use it and figure out how to incorporate it into their classes."
@@DevineInnovations my kids are showing their teachers how to use their computers. My 6 year olds has learned how to play mine craft on his own. I die in about 10 minutes. Though I guess he has had you tube and a lock down. Even as pre schoolers, they'd play games on the library computers and work it out themselves. Some educational - color matching and numbers and stuff. Others not so much. You used to be able to get sugar to run in a window or a VM or something. I reckon kids would have been able to learn it.
As a Peace Corps Volunteer serving in Zanzibar when this was announced, trying to run a secondary school computer lab - I was desperate for this project to succeed.
Ah, Peace Corps volunteers.. they once visited my town, when I was a high school student. They taught the English class for 3 months and the most thing I remember was that they used Powerpoint's Super Mario educational game (means: the game is made in Microsoft Powerpoint) as a tool for learning. Cool.
Here in Uruguay it was the computer that WAS, we were the biggest buyers of these things, and it really worked. Every child on primary school had one provided by the government, with these we started the infrastructure that allowed us in today's pandemic (with newer PC's) transition from classes in school to classes from home flawlessly, with no child left behind. I live in a country that not everyone can afford having a computer, but these were the stepping stone to a an amazing education system for public schools, and I'm very grateful for that.
I mean Uruguayan education is still very underfounded and has a lot of problems but what you say is true. When I was a kid we had nothing like quite literally I remember all we had in the house was a single bed and I remember this program was just starting. My first ever computer was an XO 1.5
I had one, and the screen is actually genius ! I always wondered why they didn't generalize the technology on phones and other embedded devices that are often used outside and where battery life is important. It was perfectly readable in the sun, way better than any backlit LCD, and used less battery since you could shut the backlight off. I believe some adventure GPS devices like the garmin Montana use similar screens.
I would like to see that screen too in mobile devices, the last one I used such is the Nokia 6600 or so, and the Pebble Watch. That had a similar display.
@@d.e.v.z.e.r.o They were available for a while - the display technology was shifted off to a company called PixelQi but they didn't seem to get any significant design wins and the company seems to be defunct - there is a website, but it appears to just be a link farm with no relevance to displays.
My watch has a display like that (some Sharp Memory LCD) and It’s fucking brilliant. I don’t get it either. The biggest thing in transflective displays right now besides e-Ink is TCL making a tablet with a transflective LCD, but it already seems to be delayed.
To be fair, contrast, colors, etc... are far from being as good as classic LCDs. It's more in line with LCDs from the early 90's... I don't know if it' s because there is less investment in that tech, or if the transflective part just prevents it. So I suppose most people wouldn't want that on their shiny new phone, but still, I would like to have the choice to get a phone or laptop with that kind of screen...
I actually had high hopes for this project - the trials they did in Africa for deployment that were fundamentally sound - but it was depressing to see this fail.
Netbooks definitely happened due to the XO-1, and netbooks drove down the cost for parts, like screens and made Intel create the ultra-low power CPU category of Atom and it's later iterations you can buy to this day. Even if the XO-1 itself didn't happen on the scale it was supposed to, it definitely helped to make computers cheap enough in 3rd world counties, so in a sense it succeeded.
I was about to say the same. When I started messing with computers, notebooks where very expensive. The first one I got was a EEEPC Seashell from Asus. While limited, it actually was usable for the time and served well for several years in my family.
I really wanted to like netbooks. I remember buying one in 2011, just as the fad was dying down. It came with Windows 7 Starter - it was utterly unusable, a simple security update would freeze everything. Only with Lubuntu did it become a relatively good tiny laptop.
And while netbooks were sort of a flop as well, ultimately they evolved into Chromebooks which seems to have finally cracked the problem of creating cheap, but still decent laptops.
EA even made SimCity opensource during the project. I find it to be extremely noble what has been attempted here, of course today things look a little different and people would rather pick up a low priced tablet which too is fine as long as everyone has access to technology.
Aw, I remember these things, and the give-one-get-one campaign. They had really good intentions but hitting even the price they did was a hard task. Still awesome to see these now and again though, I don't doubt that out there somewhere they helped inspire someone!
@hillbilly tech yeah nope, I got mine in 2007, It was the only computer in my house for like 6 years after that, although my case wasn't super common still, plenty of kids relied on them for years, the program is still going on in my country, just that now kids get more normal-like laptops running both linux and windows
I liked the idea you could even hand-crank it, in order to keep it going. The idea of low-powered devices for certain emerging markets wasn't off but what really probably killed this whole endeavour off in the end were subsequent advances in mobile technology and networks; as an educated guess, the cell phone became the real gateway to the Internet.
@@aoikemono6414 Not entirely. While internet access would be a problem, the laptops were capable of mesh networking, so you could still send data around a classroom.
I remember reading and hearing about this at school as a kid. We tried to raise money to get these computers for kids in 3rd world countries. I was fascinated by them but I knew they had to be pretty slow.
I was very interested in this project back when it was being developed. I was a child at the time, interested in computing and always wanted a laptop. Sadly we didn't have much money in the family so I was stuck with an old PC. I was sad when the project was delayed so many times and didn't really achieve its goals. But I guess that in the end Raspberry Pi did what this couldn't. It brought a small, cheap and capable computer into hands of everyone by mostly economies of scale.
I remember seeing the commercial for the "Give One, Get One" campaign on Cartoon Network as a kid. I wanted a laptop so bad and I thought this thing looked so cool! I still think it's an impressive piece of technology for its time and I'm glad to know that so many of them were shipped to children who needed them. Imagine how amazing it would have been if OLPC were able to meet their goal.
One place where it really failed, especially in hindsight, was going with an x86-based system. ARM has proven to be a far better system in low-power devices, and the Raspberry Pi project shows what the XO *could* have been, if they hadn't been strongarmed into using an x86 chip.
Re: the hand crank charger. I was involved in a community XO project, and one of the tasks we chose was doing generator based charging. It turned out to be a bust -- the XO's battery could only sink the equivalent current to charge at a rate of about 2 1/2 hours to full charge. You'd have to spin that crank forever. The closest we came (concept, never built one) was to use a bicycle to drive a generator, charging a larger battery, then using that battery to charge XOs.
a hand crank by a human is about 10 to 15 watts before it get to hard to turn. charging something the size of a laptop battery would litterly take days.
@@gogereaver349 The XO's battery was about 25W, so it would have taken about two hours to charge. Unfortunately they never got the power consumption down to what they hoped for, so a charge was only good for about two and a half hours (on color backlight) 😀.
From the moment it was launched I've wanted one, even knowing its limitations. The transflective display particularly caught my eye, I wish we had those in phones.
the XO 1.5 was my first ever working computer, then the magallanes (or however you call it) and well, now I got my own desktop pc, but this was my first ever experience with linux, and I spent hours tinkering with the OS of the magallanes since it was a somewhat custom Ubuntu distro, and I managed to install all sorts of oses, that was the first time I really got interested in trying out linux distros, I installed windows XP, Manajaro, Ubuntu (the original one not the one provided by the government), puppy linux and lastly I installed debian when I already knew a bit more about linux and started to dislike some of the changes cannonical was making to ubuntu.
I got one for $6 at a goodwill, compiled my own kernel, and made it setup for doing terminal access (wired one of the USB ports to a serial adapter internally) I love its ease of repair, and even after loosing screws i found it keeps spares in the handle (remove screws by battery to get the handle cover off)
@@Farquad76.547 when taking a laptop to a site that is in a scary part of town (or an area with a lot of dust and dirt and other airboarn debris) to reprogram a router/switch, do i want to take a $600 laptop that could break by looking at it wrong, or a $6 kid proof one, (also why i have a cheap 200$ hp cloud with linux on it. cheap laptop i dont care about goes with me to bad parts of town in areas that are not suited for laptops, and good laptop goes with me to sites were i dont have to worry about it. although i rarely do that stuff any more, i do like having a cheap durable laptop for jobs i dont want to take my expensive one (to me) out on. (although i do have like 10 laptops, ranging from the OLPC and some P4's to a 2010 macbook, and my main lenovo)
@3:32 A Li-Fe it looks like they went out of their way to use battery chemistry that has a high cycle life in the thousands compared to lithium ion batteries which often rated for a few hundred charge cycles! Or was that chemistry more of a thing in the early 2000s? It's just starting to become more mainstream in 2021.
Actually Uruguay was the first country to full go on with the initiative, and though even the learning goals of the OLPC project weren’t fully completed (education is a mess still to be solved here), it may have reached a way larger goal: it hugely leveled the technical gap between social and economic situations inside the country, giving all children a chance to access the internet, communicate, learn and grow. Though it ultimately failed, the OLPC project did some real good during the process and deserves some merit for that.
Damn, 3 hours of battery life with a 3 Ah battery? My laptop has a 70 Wh battery and lasts around one hour. This shrek laptop is probably the most battery efficient thing i've seen
@@adaml.5355 I am sorry but I have to correct you on this, your phone battery is wayyy smaller than this laptop. Yes, it's 3ah but the capacity is not the same because of different voltage, using watthours is the most accurate way to compare battery capacity, Ah depends on voltage.
I always liked this little Shrek laptop. The idea of very low powered machines for students in poor countries was definitely a good one even if it didn't quite pan out.
I have an even older version, a prototype that didn't even have enough RAM to run the released operating system. (128MB I think), and therefor was obsolete month after I got it.
Very interesting video. I remember the hoopla about these and thought $100 was an amazing target price because laptops were pretty expensive at the time. As Collin said, there were no $120 plastic chromebooks you could pick up at Walmart like you can find now. I remember buying an MSI Wind netbook a little after this and was amazed I could get a computer for $300. I went to eBay to see if there were any X0-1 machines available and was surprised to see that they still fetch a pretty good price around $70 with shipping for a working device. I am not sure I would want to spend that much but they do kind of feel like they could be a collectors item. Trying to decide how mad my wife will be if I stack another "vintage" laptop in the closet.
Yeah, I remember watching this closely at the time. Back then a laptop seemed like a completely unattainable goal for a kid. I was heartbroken when the Buy One Give One program happened and it was 400 dollars instead of the promised 100. Eventually I ended up getting an Acer Aspire One (I believe it was around 200) and ran that thing until it died.
The problem was, the reason there were no $100 laptops at the time was it was an impossible price point to hit. It sounded good in the media, but to try and reach it -- they failed anway -- they totally crippled the machine.
The mesh network was the least of the problems. I tested one and everything was slow, the display was already tearing apart and the keyboard was not really child-proof
Ahh yes, the infamous XO Laptop. I remember it well. Never knew the details or history behind it, but I do remember the little Princess spending time on it and enjoying it's limited features and games.
If only a modern laptop was available that's sturdy like this and repairable, with a removable battery. I like how the swivel-screen doubles as an e-Reader.
Its one of thouse things that people think they want right up to the point when they have to put money down. Then other factors like weight, performance, looks or upfront price win out over repairability.
@@KonradZielinski Check the reviews on the Framework laptop, maybe even check one yourself if you have the time. Might also want to check out Pine64 devices. Then come back and tell me it's not practical or convenient.
I grew up in Uruguay, and we had those computers when i was like eight or so, it was the most awesome thing a 3rd world country kid could ask for, with internet browsing, some flash soupport (sometimes flash games worked fine others were like 3 fps) and most important it had a Doom port, which played very fluid on the machine. Had some good memories watching this video.
I remember being 7 or 8 years old and wanting one of these when it came out! Unfortunately, like a lot of us, I lived in a first-world, western country and it wasn't eligible for purchase in the US, even though we grew up pretty poor. I really wanted my own laptop because I wanted to do stuff without worrying about my dad beating my ass when I kept breaking the family PC. Eventually I got a refurbished Pentium III Compaq Presario, which was probably spec'd at the same level as the OLPC even though it was almost a decade older. Totally could've seen myself messing around with the OLPC, probably would've given me earlier exposure to Linux too. But I totally would've tried to get Windows 98 and XP on it too.
Yeah, you're so unfortunate that you were born in a first world country... Also it was available for a short time in the US under a "buy one, give one" type arrangement.
Maybe they should have started by selling to low income families in first world countries before trying to sell to every third world country. It would have been easier and they could have made more money to put back into the company.
I remember wanting one too, they were fully deployed to public schools where I was living at the time …but I was going to a lower middle class private school. Too poor to buy a laptop too posh to get one from the government.
This project was was great, and really ambitious with the specs and price for that time period. If it was started a few years later I'm sure they would have started with an ARM chip. They got 3 million out and that's not bad. The membrane keyboard is irritating, but it makes sense for wear, and also probably made it much easier to customize alternate language layouts.
The port cover/hinge lock/WiFi antenna was so smart, and so was much of this thing's design. They were clever and functional, with a clear goal in mind. Kudos.
I was just thinking about this machine the other day. It had so many great ideas and I loved its flashy but functional design. I kind of wish the screen technology had made it into other products. I wonder if they would have been able to keep the cost down if they'd thought about selling it to consumers. I mean, the more you make, they cheaper it becomes.
There was a lot of interest among first-world buyers, which is why the buy-one-gift-one program was initiated. I think the big problem was simply the difficulty of manufacturing enough of the things at that price point. They could have made a lot more, and still probably sold them all.
I remember these! I was really interested in the mesh networking idea combined with the semi rugged construction. Was sad these never really made it and stuck around. I'd love a laptop with some of the XO's features and modern specs
The problem being that you had other better options. So a olpc laptop gave you nothing. If it was the only computer you had access to, you would have used it a lot. I mean its lightyears abov. What an 80's kid like me had growing up.
Uruguay Nomah. We used this machines around 2007 to 2014 in public schools since the government approved a plan which consisted of delivering one of this machines to each student of the country. If I recall there where 3 variants of this machines this one shown here, an updated model with a plastic shielding around the keys and then there was a blue variant that was more powerful and it ran Gnome (if I'm not mistaking). They weren't really good, but it could run Doom at least, there were even a few games made here for the machine by indie devs and some by the state, there were also a bunch of flash games compilations made by homebrew sites.
Haha! I owned one of these! (Still have it) I got it on my 4th birthday and there was a doom and sim city Clone on it. That basically was my gaming start. It wasn't terrible. Especially when you are that young
I remember thinking the OLPC thing was the coolest back when it was announced. I recall writing a thing about it for school. I had no idea about the subsequent versions though.
This brings back beautiful memories, I worked with the team as an ambassador for this project and we were able to deploy 4000 laptops to students in schools in underserved communities in NIgeria. We trained teaches and students to make this work, we enjoyed a good level of success.
@@DanafoxyVixen Both were adopted in educational environments both in developed and developing countries. It was the same market and this device got outclassed. The unfair competition came from the Intel Classmate PC, but that was heavily subsidized by Intel and Microsoft as a means to prevent ARM, AMD, and Linux to make a dent in the next generation of computer users and operators.
Have any other laptops used an Li-Fe battery? I always thought this was a cool idea, I still do. I'm not sure how big an impact it had but the device they came up with seems really well designed.
That display is actually pretty dang sweet. I really like the idea of turning the backlight off and having it switch to a B&W readable mode for outdoor use.
I remember hearing about this! In 2007, as a Primary 4 (≈ 5th grade) student, I'd often have my dad save me the technology and Sunday comic sections from The Straits Times newspapers he would read* on Wednesdays and Sundays respectively, and I heard about the XO project through the former. News of the XO prototype was how I heard about Linux at the time, but I didn't know how to get a Linux distro at the time, later hearing about Ubuntu 7.10 through a later edition of that newspaper, and trying Ubuntu 8.04 inside VMware Player. Back then, Linux-based desktop OSes felt like a whole different world to me, and today, I live in that different world most of the time, still returning to Windows frequently for some developers like Evernote and others who don't offer their software on X/Wayland Linux/BSD, but do on Windows. *He stopped doing that many years ago when he switched to reading through Nestia, and when other people share articles with him.
Man I had one of those, as Juanchis said im from Uruguay and all kids had one, I remember it had some kind of TV app on it that we would use to watch TV (Im not sure if it was IPTV) on the class but all the channels were from some obscure east europe country
You should do a longer video about the included software and OS. If I remember correctly it was all written in python and you where supposed to be able to right click and view source on just about anything. Good video, thanks you.
I remember seeing a commercial sponsoring fruit snacks like Fruit Gushers and Fruit Rollups for a contest where one kid climbs from his fence and running to Africa to deliver one of those laptops to a kid there.
6:12 The whole point of OLPC was to encourage experimentation and reward curiosity, hence the easy access to the parts underneath the GUI. I believe also the magnifying glass key actually means “view source”, as in “look at the source code for whatever is running now”. One unusual thing about Sugar was its “journal” system, where you had a systemwide list of all the activities you had done recently, including links to the documents you had worked on. The Sugar project is still active, even today. Packages are available in the standard Debian repo.
I mean this XO-1 Computer was meant for Education and runs a Custom Fedora Linux Distro OS known as OLPC OS using Sugar, the open-source desktop environment. I really like the design since it has 2 antennas almost like a router.
I had 2 revisions (2010 and 2012 models) of these (my first one got replaced for a newer one) I loved it especially the second one since it had a ability to switch System, i remember emulating old windows stuff with wine and playing flash game compilations. So good memories. I wish I could get a new one
The primary school I work at here in Australia, we received 150 of these, didn't cost us a cent. We got about 40 or so in 1 shipment, and then at a later date they supplied us with the rest of them. They also supplied us with charging stands, and several repair kit boxes (New screens, keyboards, antennas, etc...). All of ours initially came with Sugar, and BEFORE we were even allowed to receive any of the XO's, we had to nominate some teachers that had to have training for the SugarOS. Once the training was done, and we received the XO's, no other teacher was allowed to use them. All our XO-4's came with the mesh capability, and they were using it quite extensively (This was around 2014). Eventually we replaced Sugar with Android, but that was really the downfall of the XO, the Android interface just wasn't as nice to use compared to Sugar. In the end, the OLPC contacted us (around 2018 I think it was), and asked us to return as many as we could, I still have a few left at the school, and still have all the repair kits they sent us.
I have several of these still. I really believed in the concept when they were announced and wanted to make apps and games for it. But it was pretty clear things were not going to work out. They neglected the growth of Netbook market that was ultimately doing better than what OLPC could do in terms of price and performance of the hardware. On the software side, I think the problem was more fundamental. I saw the attitude of typical western way of thinking and just providing kids with edutainment level of softwares. I always argued it should be something that could lead for kids to directly work with everything that the workplace uses including the OS. The argument was that you can install Linux based equivalent of word processor, spreadsheet and so on. I still wish it would have been a different story in the alternate history. Perhaps some sort of agreement could have been made for Apple to come up with a version of OS X that was open source... Or someone business savvy was in charge at OLPC to have more of a market ready model... :(
Thank you so much for this review. We all know that project was a failure, but normal reviews just focus on that. You took the time to take it apart and analyse the components.
I vaguely remember reading about this in a magazine when I still was in primary school. Nice to see a video about it after all that time, I almost forgot it completely.
I have two of these XO-1s that I got for free at a swap meet. Both were experiencing the firmware bug that plagued these models. When the CMOS battery drained, it reset the internal clock which then prevented the computer from powering on. Fortunately this bug can be fixed using a serial connection and updated firmware. I made a really basic video ages ago that I titled "Two Laptops Per Adult" documenting my experience with restoring these.
hmm, with all of its durability design and options for solar or hand-cranked power, this could make for a prepper's survival computer to stash away in the bunker
I've long since forgotten about this project. The initial revisions made use of my crypto/math libraries to secure the bios(firmware) from tampering. That was an entire lifetime ago though geez hehehe.
Computers have gotten so much cheaper now, and you have the ability to download an archive of Wikipedia to a 60 gb file. Students can access an incredibly large body of knowledge offline through a smart phone, tablet, or laptop now. Only issue is electricity. Power banks are very cheap if you're using solar at the school, and i would imagine having a panel in rural homes would have benefits as well outside of simply charging a laptop or phone.
I remember seeing this campaign in what I think was a Go-Gurt commercial as a kid? I always thought it was super weird cause I'd never seen a laptop look like that.
Still one of the projects I'm proudest to have been a part of in my life and that I was the saddest about it's failure. It might not have worked, but we had some damn good ideas that wound up paving the way for other things. What still gets me is that the hand crank wasn't a part of the machine by default like it was in all of the prototypes (battery life was always on the chopping block) and it wasn't quite as powerful as it needed to be even for educational uses. It could have been a killer dual purpose hacking/light gaming machine for on-the-go but it just wasn't powerful enough to do anything really useful. I still think putting those controller buttons on the face was a great idea. I'm shocked to hear it actually made some wide adoption, I remember the whole thing just fizzling out. I knew the project was over though when people kept insisting on shoving windows onto it and even some governments refusing to adopt the project without windows support. That wasn't what it was designed for at all but we see even today people refuse to break their x86 addiction. It's just the way these things go once they hit the mainstream, and this was a hard way to learn that for a lot of us. You can see the same thing happening today with so many people buying Raspberry Pi's just to use them as retro game machines and refusing to learn anything about the OS much less actually run it to transfer their roms. People might laugh at us and say we are wasting our time, but when the goal is noble and the cause is just it makes it all worth it.
I'm going to be the cynic here. The OLPC strikes me as another example of what privileged first world minds think when it comes to the needs of kids from developing nations. They design a ridiculous piece of underpowered hardware that ultimately is a compromised platform to learn on with an emphasis on ergonomics and durability that is not required but ends up eating much of their design and production budget. Kids don't need a glorified Fisher Price laptop, they benefit more with real hardware and operating systems to learn on. By the mid 2000s, there were plenty of low priced laptops that would have been good choices. The foundation could have focused on gathering corporate and government sponsorships to offset the costs of donating the hardware where it was needed, but instead they chose to spend their efforts and money on developing a bespoke hardware that was hopelessly weak and unsustainable. It got them more attention and press, but they could have achieved much more.
I remember the ads for this thing but never did know what happened to the project. And tbf it did get replaced by the rpi and various projects that utilize that. Especially the pitop that I think is still around and pines alternative XD
I remember seeing announcements of these, including the concept with the built-in hand crank. But, I'm not aware of those here in Brazil. The intentions were good, and the efforts were worth it, but, it really meant a lot of planning and cost cuts, which included performance. If it was born a few years later, in the era of smartphones and tablets, with better and cheaper components, it probably would go further.
oh i remember these when i was in primary school at the age of 11, it was really bizarre when these were in all the year levels at my school dispite having normal laptops onsite anyway back in 2014.
Today it seems that a similar device would be worth its weight in gold. Priced at $ 100, of course. Remote learning needs cheap, simple computers for every child.
First of all, thank you very much for introducing a topic I've never seen covered before. I think it would be interesting to put a team together and challenged them to hit that $100 mark through design changes and sourcing components. A lot of nations have components made cheaply by using a miserly paid work force and pocket the margin between cost and price. What if they can be convinced to sell some of those components at cost so that the poor of their own country as well as others could have computers.
I'd studied Sugar quite a bit before Android came out. I remember my shock. "I've seen this API before... tasks, activities, yes". It was much more efficient in python, too.
Thanks for reviewing this. You did an excellent job of capturing the OLPC story in a nutshell. I still have mine from the buy-1-give-1 program, and I still remember the struggles and trials of the program.
Man this is an impressive bit of kit honestly. Probably ahead of it's time really, but a similar initiative these days could probably be run with netbooks or a small laptop running linux.
I had one as a backup for when I got grounded xD it watched RUclips so that was enough for me. I learned a lot about Linux from this little thing. Weren’t they supposed to have a dual screen one?
What I remember about these was that they only slightly predated the netbook craze. Around the time I was hearing about the XO1, Asus launched the EeePC line. For only $350 or so - less than the give-one-get-one cost - you got a smaller machine with a better keyboard, more RAM, and more storage, that was also a "normal" PC that you could easily get XP or a standard Linux running on. Prior to this, small machines commanded a huge premium - see the Toshiba Libretto and Sony Picturebook series for example. I think at the time the desire for cheap PCs was heating up, but XO1's downfall was it's focus on children, leading many to just see it as a kids toy. But I feel the success of the OLPC project was encouraging the rest of the industry to get costs down, starting with netbooks and eventually trickling down to just about every laptop becoming cheaper and more affordable.
I remember when these were first announced, It was a really good idea, I wish they could have achieved it more effectively. The raspberry pi I think has become more of a successor to this idea. $35 little computers you can do anything you want with that can connect up to just about any screen you can find. So for about $50 to $60 bucks you can get a computer up and running using an old tv a cheap mouse and keyboard with everything being stored on plentiful and cheap SD cards, the idea has kind of pushed forward. And unlike the OLPC initiative, Raspberry Pi had wider spread appeal in industry and general maker space that it just became possible to perpetuate itself far more than OLPC's XO-1 as it wasn't just a non-profit trying to bring computers for education to the 3rd world. Raspberry Pi was trying to bring computers and learning To anyone and everyone interested. The XO-1 is still an interesting piece of tech, with good ideas behind it.
I remember when my friends and I used to play with the XO the typical games of any XO of a student in Uruguay, such as Vascolet 4 or XA contra los cuatreros galácticos, or when the XO 4 v2 came out and it came with the option of starting on Android 4 or Ubuntu 16.4 LTS, those were very good times
I knew one of the software devs working on this project and had some hands on time with a few different models. The wireless mesh was pretty cool because (if i remember correctly) they were working on allowing a group of the laptops to communicate and interact without any internet connection or routers.
I remember seeing this in a book about technology, I never had one but I really wanted it because of all its gimmicks. it's as if you let a child design a device, and actually made all the features feasible.
Here in Uruguay it was everywhere since it was a government backed initiative, we called them Ceibalitas because the project was called Plan Ceibal. I was one of the first kids to get one, the rollout started in my city. Never got any revisions but I know of kids that did, there was a blue one too which ran a standard build of linux if I recall correctly! We never used it as a learning tool in class but I know teachers had to go to computer courses to try and give them some use. A lot of local game devs released games for the XO, usually paid for by brands who wanted to make a game with their brand on it, but there was also some government backed videogames which focused more on the learning side, maths and history were the main ones.
Interesting
(and yes, it ran doom)
Las viciadas al Doom que pagamos en eso, yo recibí la mía en el 2007 por ahí
With an average eye cue of 96, they might have actually done some good there. But rest assured the do-gooders were NOT targeting you. They were targeting countries were the average eye cue is in the high 60s to low 70s (yes, there are many) or India where it is 83.
People REALLY want to believe eye cue is wrong or fake or entirely a product of the environment, but there is no one measure of people more accurate and with more predictive power than this simple number.
People also have no idea how well these figures are studied and how even the US government keeps a running tally of what jobs require what eye cue score range and how no amount of training can make up for the deficit in eye cue. (youtube will autodelete my comment if it contains the correct spelling). Conversely, no amount of lack of training (with a few exceptions requiring a LOT of acquired knowledge) will keep high eye cue people from performing well at a job after an initial period where he learns the job.
One reason so many of us now go to college is because the government has made eye cue testing prospective employees de-facto illegal. In MANY, MANY jobs, a college degree is just a proxy for eye cue.
The blue one was probably Intel's Classmate, the OLPC competitor they made at the time
Quick fact add: The screen was only 1200 pixels wide with backlight off thanks to a neat prism effect. Light coming in would use the red/green/blue pixels as individual shades of grey. With light coming from the backlight they show as RGB. Really neat design.
Yeah, the screen was 1200 x 900 pixels, but a color dot was actually three pixels (RGB). It was actually difficult to establish a screen resolution equivalence in RGB mode. The best conversion I was familiar with was an effective resolution of around 700 x 500 (resolution divided by square root of 3). However, that was still just a convention, you had 1200 x 900 resolution, but only color information at a third of that.
It was great that it was perfectly readable in direct sunlight. Was a neat device overall. The company that made the transflective displays tried to enter the general market too but ended up folding sadly
I never understood why this panel type never made its way into other consumer electronics.
@@frankdogui7195 It was designed to be efficient and practical, and most importantly, did not glow an obnoxious bright blue like all consumer electronics of the early 2000s.
I would like to see that screen on a phone
This was such an ambitious project, and I'm glad to see that it got out to a not insignificant number of children. We need more efforts like this today.
The better news about edutech is the sugar desktop is a relatively easy to set up on a lot of distros. Including those that run on Raspberry Pis.
"not insignificant" = "significant"
Smartphones have opened up a big gap for the developing world. It's not as useful as a laptop but far cheaper and has opened up the internet and computing for millions (if not billions) of people.
for what? ... not even the creator of Half-Life (Marc Laidlaw) has a compunter anymore >> ruclips.net/video/PadfhL29nOo/видео.html
@Zaydan Naufal Problem with phones are its form factor, its tiny screen and limited productivity use.
But then phones can be laptops if plugged in with laptop-liks accessory. Sadly this feature is still exclusive among flaghsips.
Well at least there are cheap tablets these days.
Got one, got one of the blue as well, i remember making a car that followed a color line around a track(by shamelessly ripping off the logic of another project, dont remember what program it was made on tho)
I also remember spending 99.9% of my time using the blue one in linux, playing wine games and listening to "Numb" and "In The End" by Linking park (i was in high school)
Tbh they where amazing machines even tho i hated how underpowered they where (the blue one tho played quake just fine in wine), but now i can appreciate them for what they meant to be
Sadly all their capabilities were wasted by my teachers never using them at all, for pretty much anything
They just become videogame consoles and media consumption machines for the kids who got them, wich it was cool lmao but not really their intended purposes, although i can see some linux fans growing up with the blue one
Contenxt: im from Uruguay and i got both via the "Ceibal Plan" like the other guy in the comments
"Sadly all their capabilities were wasted by my teachers never using them at all, for pretty much anything"
When I was watching this I was thinking, "That seems nice and all, but the teachers still have to learn how to use it and figure out how to incorporate it into their classes."
@@DevineInnovations my kids are showing their teachers how to use their computers. My 6 year olds has learned how to play mine craft on his own. I die in about 10 minutes.
Though I guess he has had you tube and a lock down.
Even as pre schoolers, they'd play games on the library computers and work it out themselves. Some educational - color matching and numbers and stuff. Others not so much.
You used to be able to get sugar to run in a window or a VM or something. I reckon kids would have been able to learn it.
As a Peace Corps Volunteer serving in Zanzibar when this was announced, trying to run a secondary school computer lab - I was desperate for this project to succeed.
Ah, Peace Corps volunteers.. they once visited my town, when I was a high school student. They taught the English class for 3 months and the most thing I remember was that they used Powerpoint's Super Mario educational game (means: the game is made in Microsoft Powerpoint) as a tool for learning. Cool.
Wow, Karibu Sana
Here in Uruguay it was the computer that WAS, we were the biggest buyers of these things, and it really worked. Every child on primary school had one provided by the government, with these we started the infrastructure that allowed us in today's pandemic (with newer PC's) transition from classes in school to classes from home flawlessly, with no child left behind. I live in a country that not everyone can afford having a computer, but these were the stepping stone to a an amazing education system for public schools, and I'm very grateful for that.
I mean Uruguayan education is still very underfounded and has a lot of problems but what you say is true.
When I was a kid we had nothing like quite literally I remember all we had in the house was a single bed and I remember this program was just starting. My first ever computer was an XO 1.5
I had one, and the screen is actually genius ! I always wondered why they didn't generalize the technology on phones and other embedded devices that are often used outside and where battery life is important. It was perfectly readable in the sun, way better than any backlit LCD, and used less battery since you could shut the backlight off.
I believe some adventure GPS devices like the garmin Montana use similar screens.
I would like to see that screen too in mobile devices, the last one I used such is the Nokia 6600 or so, and the Pebble Watch. That had a similar display.
@@d.e.v.z.e.r.o They were available for a while - the display technology was shifted off to a company called PixelQi but they didn't seem to get any significant design wins and the company seems to be defunct - there is a website, but it appears to just be a link farm with no relevance to displays.
If a neat technology isn't implemented anywhere my first guess is some copyright/legal stuff.
Or maybe it isn't as neat as everyone thought.
My watch has a display like that (some Sharp Memory LCD) and It’s fucking brilliant. I don’t get it either.
The biggest thing in transflective displays right now besides e-Ink is TCL making a tablet with a transflective LCD, but it already seems to be delayed.
To be fair, contrast, colors, etc... are far from being as good as classic LCDs. It's more in line with LCDs from the early 90's... I don't know if it' s because there is less investment in that tech, or if the transflective part just prevents it. So I suppose most people wouldn't want that on their shiny new phone, but still, I would like to have the choice to get a phone or laptop with that kind of screen...
I actually had high hopes for this project - the trials they did in Africa for deployment that were fundamentally sound - but it was depressing to see this fail.
3 mil made wasent relly a fail. its just netbooks and now chromebooks took there place.
All the aid to Africa fails. Waste of fn time.
Netbooks definitely happened due to the XO-1, and netbooks drove down the cost for parts, like screens and made Intel create the ultra-low power CPU category of Atom and it's later iterations you can buy to this day. Even if the XO-1 itself didn't happen on the scale it was supposed to, it definitely helped to make computers cheap enough in 3rd world counties, so in a sense it succeeded.
I was about to say the same. When I started messing with computers, notebooks where very expensive. The first one I got was a EEEPC Seashell from Asus. While limited, it actually was usable for the time and served well for several years in my family.
I really wanted to like netbooks. I remember buying one in 2011, just as the fad was dying down. It came with Windows 7 Starter - it was utterly unusable, a simple security update would freeze everything. Only with Lubuntu did it become a relatively good tiny laptop.
And while netbooks were sort of a flop as well, ultimately they evolved into Chromebooks which seems to have finally cracked the problem of creating cheap, but still decent laptops.
@@MattExzy Yes, Lubuntu is very light and great on system!
Netbooks where a false economy though
EA even made SimCity opensource during the project.
I find it to be extremely noble what has been attempted here, of course today things look a little different and people would rather pick up a low priced tablet which too is fine as long as everyone has access to technology.
Aw, I remember these things, and the give-one-get-one campaign. They had really good intentions but hitting even the price they did was a hard task.
Still awesome to see these now and again though, I don't doubt that out there somewhere they helped inspire someone!
@hillbilly tech yeah nope, I got mine in 2007, It was the only computer in my house for like 6 years after that, although my case wasn't super common still, plenty of kids relied on them for years, the program is still going on in my country, just that now kids get more normal-like laptops running both linux and windows
@@LeoMkII Did the arrival of Chromebooks make a big difference?
I liked the idea you could even hand-crank it, in order to keep it going. The idea of low-powered devices for certain emerging markets wasn't off but what really probably killed this whole endeavour off in the end were subsequent advances in mobile technology and networks; as an educated guess, the cell phone became the real gateway to the Internet.
You're not wrong. It was the inexpensive android phones that finally got mass adoption in my country (Bangladesh). Computers are still miles behind.
IIRC early concept art and mockups of the device had a hand crank built in, but that proved infeasible.
I would imagine if u were in a place with no easy access to elextricity, then wifi would also be MIA
@@aoikemono6414 Not entirely. While internet access would be a problem, the laptops were capable of mesh networking, so you could still send data around a classroom.
I remember reading and hearing about this at school as a kid. We tried to raise money to get these computers for kids in 3rd world countries. I was fascinated by them but I knew they had to be pretty slow.
I was very interested in this project back when it was being developed. I was a child at the time, interested in computing and always wanted a laptop. Sadly we didn't have much money in the family so I was stuck with an old PC. I was sad when the project was delayed so many times and didn't really achieve its goals. But I guess that in the end Raspberry Pi did what this couldn't. It brought a small, cheap and capable computer into hands of everyone by mostly economies of scale.
isn't it awesome though that right now one can buy a used older laptop for like 20-30$ that will actually work for basic usage
I remember seeing the commercial for the "Give One, Get One" campaign on Cartoon Network as a kid. I wanted a laptop so bad and I thought this thing looked so cool!
I still think it's an impressive piece of technology for its time and I'm glad to know that so many of them were shipped to children who needed them. Imagine how amazing it would have been if OLPC were able to meet their goal.
They paved the way for netbooks so they kind of did
One place where it really failed, especially in hindsight, was going with an x86-based system. ARM has proven to be a far better system in low-power devices, and the Raspberry Pi project shows what the XO *could* have been, if they hadn't been strongarmed into using an x86 chip.
@@watchm4ker well i mean they did use an arm chip for 1.75 as stated in the video
@@sinphy superseded by the Raspberry Pi and for lower cost.
There goal should have been for all kids, not just kids in other countries.
Re: the hand crank charger. I was involved in a community XO project, and one of the tasks we chose was doing generator based charging. It turned out to be a bust -- the XO's battery could only sink the equivalent current to charge at a rate of about 2 1/2 hours to full charge. You'd have to spin that crank forever. The closest we came (concept, never built one) was to use a bicycle to drive a generator, charging a larger battery, then using that battery to charge XOs.
Worked for Gilligan
You just needed more coconuts.
And the Professor
Mary Ann wouldn't hurt either
a hand crank by a human is about 10 to 15 watts before it get to hard to turn. charging something the size of a laptop battery would litterly take days.
@@gogereaver349 The XO's battery was about 25W, so it would have taken about two hours to charge. Unfortunately they never got the power consumption down to what they hoped for, so a charge was only good for about two and a half hours (on color backlight) 😀.
From the moment it was launched I've wanted one, even knowing its limitations. The transflective display particularly caught my eye, I wish we had those in phones.
the XO 1.5 was my first ever working computer, then the magallanes (or however you call it) and well, now I got my own desktop pc, but this was my first ever experience with linux, and I spent hours tinkering with the OS of the magallanes since it was a somewhat custom Ubuntu distro, and I managed to install all sorts of oses, that was the first time I really got interested in trying out linux distros, I installed windows XP, Manajaro, Ubuntu (the original one not the one provided by the government), puppy linux and lastly I installed debian when I already knew a bit more about linux and started to dislike some of the changes cannonical was making to ubuntu.
I got one for $6 at a goodwill, compiled my own kernel, and made it setup for doing terminal access (wired one of the USB ports to a serial adapter internally)
I love its ease of repair, and even after loosing screws i found it keeps spares in the handle (remove screws by battery to get the handle cover off)
@@Farquad76.547 when taking a laptop to a site that is in a scary part of town (or an area with a lot of dust and dirt and other airboarn debris) to reprogram a router/switch, do i want to take a $600 laptop that could break by looking at it wrong, or a $6 kid proof one, (also why i have a cheap 200$ hp cloud with linux on it.
cheap laptop i dont care about goes with me to bad parts of town in areas that are not suited for laptops, and good laptop goes with me to sites were i dont have to worry about it.
although i rarely do that stuff any more, i do like having a cheap durable laptop for jobs i dont want to take my expensive one (to me) out on. (although i do have like 10 laptops, ranging from the OLPC and some P4's to a 2010 macbook, and my main lenovo)
@@jjjacer Plus the built-in "anti-theft" feature of the fact that it looks like a kid's laptop (which was actually part of the original design specs)
@3:32 A Li-Fe it looks like they went out of their way to use battery chemistry that has a high cycle life in the thousands compared to lithium ion batteries which often rated for a few hundred charge cycles! Or was that chemistry more of a thing in the early 2000s? It's just starting to become more mainstream in 2021.
This was definitely late 2000s. I remember it well. I donated to the project.
I remember seeing these on Nickelodeon or something back in the day.
Dude the ability for the screen to fade to monochrome is awesome! I wish more devices had this feature.
Actually Uruguay was the first country to full go on with the initiative, and though even the learning goals of the OLPC project weren’t fully completed (education is a mess still to be solved here), it may have reached a way larger goal: it hugely leveled the technical gap between social and economic situations inside the country, giving all children a chance to access the internet, communicate, learn and grow. Though it ultimately failed, the OLPC project did some real good during the process and deserves some merit for that.
Funny info: Plan Ceibal commited ilegal things about the root password of the OS and the Bootloader unlocking process
@@iiLH_hates_furrys really?
@@Marchelo1899 yes
Damn, 3 hours of battery life with a 3 Ah battery? My laptop has a 70 Wh battery and lasts around one hour. This shrek laptop is probably the most battery efficient thing i've seen
My my iPhone is a little supercomputer with a 3ah battery and it lasts about 10 hours.
@@adaml.5355 I am sorry but I have to correct you on this, your phone battery is wayyy smaller than this laptop. Yes, it's 3ah but the capacity is not the same because of different voltage, using watthours is the most accurate way to compare battery capacity, Ah depends on voltage.
chromebook have simler tdp and run like 11 hrs these days.
I always liked this little Shrek laptop. The idea of very low powered machines for students in poor countries was definitely a good one even if it didn't quite pan out.
I have an even older version, a prototype that didn't even have enough RAM to run the released operating system. (128MB I think), and therefor was obsolete month after I got it.
Very interesting video. I remember the hoopla about these and thought $100 was an amazing target price because laptops were pretty expensive at the time. As Collin said, there were no $120 plastic chromebooks you could pick up at Walmart like you can find now. I remember buying an MSI Wind netbook a little after this and was amazed I could get a computer for $300.
I went to eBay to see if there were any X0-1 machines available and was surprised to see that they still fetch a pretty good price around $70 with shipping for a working device. I am not sure I would want to spend that much but they do kind of feel like they could be a collectors item. Trying to decide how mad my wife will be if I stack another "vintage" laptop in the closet.
Yeah, I remember watching this closely at the time. Back then a laptop seemed like a completely unattainable goal for a kid. I was heartbroken when the Buy One Give One program happened and it was 400 dollars instead of the promised 100. Eventually I ended up getting an Acer Aspire One (I believe it was around 200) and ran that thing until it died.
The problem was, the reason there were no $100 laptops at the time was it was an impossible price point to hit. It sounded good in the media, but to try and reach it -- they failed anway -- they totally crippled the machine.
I wasn't aware of the mesh network problems. When it was still an idea, I thought this would be a game changer.
The mesh network was the least of the problems. I tested one and everything was slow, the display was already tearing apart and the keyboard was not really child-proof
A 3hr at best mesh network that relied on a slow computer. Ambitious I guess.
Ahh yes, the infamous XO Laptop. I remember it well. Never knew the details or history behind it, but I do remember the little Princess spending time on it and enjoying it's limited features and games.
If only a modern laptop was available that's sturdy like this and repairable, with a removable battery. I like how the swivel-screen doubles as an e-Reader.
So, a Framework laptop, but with a rotating hinge?
the most modern laptop like this is probably the x230t and x220t thinkpads
Bullshit. Most laptops of the era were at least as serviceable.
Its one of thouse things that people think they want right up to the point when they have to put money down. Then other factors like weight, performance, looks or upfront price win out over repairability.
@@KonradZielinski Check the reviews on the Framework laptop, maybe even check one yourself if you have the time. Might also want to check out Pine64 devices. Then come back and tell me it's not practical or convenient.
I grew up in Uruguay, and we had those computers when i was like eight or so, it was the most awesome thing a 3rd world country kid could ask for, with internet browsing, some flash soupport (sometimes flash games worked fine others were like 3 fps) and most important it had a Doom port, which played very fluid on the machine. Had some good memories watching this video.
I remember being 7 or 8 years old and wanting one of these when it came out! Unfortunately, like a lot of us, I lived in a first-world, western country and it wasn't eligible for purchase in the US, even though we grew up pretty poor. I really wanted my own laptop because I wanted to do stuff without worrying about my dad beating my ass when I kept breaking the family PC. Eventually I got a refurbished Pentium III Compaq Presario, which was probably spec'd at the same level as the OLPC even though it was almost a decade older.
Totally could've seen myself messing around with the OLPC, probably would've given me earlier exposure to Linux too. But I totally would've tried to get Windows 98 and XP on it too.
I really wonder how it would do compared to older machines as a retro setup.
Yeah, you're so unfortunate that you were born in a first world country... Also it was available for a short time in the US under a "buy one, give one" type arrangement.
Maybe they should have started by selling to low income families in first world countries before trying to sell to every third world country. It would have been easier and they could have made more money to put back into the company.
@@DevineInnovationsthat probably would have been a better way to go about it. Now it seems every kid in the US has a laptop or tablet for school.
I remember wanting one too, they were fully deployed to public schools where I was living at the time …but I was going to a lower middle class private school. Too poor to buy a laptop too posh to get one from the government.
Why not show some of the included software?
This project was was great, and really ambitious with the specs and price for that time period. If it was started a few years later I'm sure they would have started with an ARM chip. They got 3 million out and that's not bad. The membrane keyboard is irritating, but it makes sense for wear, and also probably made it much easier to customize alternate language layouts.
The port cover/hinge lock/WiFi antenna was so smart, and so was much of this thing's design. They were clever and functional, with a clear goal in mind. Kudos.
shinzu sasageyo
I was just thinking about this machine the other day. It had so many great ideas and I loved its flashy but functional design. I kind of wish the screen technology had made it into other products.
I wonder if they would have been able to keep the cost down if they'd thought about selling it to consumers. I mean, the more you make, they cheaper it becomes.
That screen technology really is amazing.
There was a lot of interest among first-world buyers, which is why the buy-one-gift-one program was initiated. I think the big problem was simply the difficulty of manufacturing enough of the things at that price point. They could have made a lot more, and still probably sold them all.
I love that Homestar Runner's laptop was based on a real computer!
Imagine if today a third party company would make products eligible to run Apple software
There was for some time, but I forgot the name of it. It was recent too :P
I remember these! I was really interested in the mesh networking idea combined with the semi rugged construction. Was sad these never really made it and stuck around. I'd love a laptop with some of the XO's features and modern specs
While not a laptop, look up what the Raspberry Pi foundation's been putting out. That gives an idea of what the XO could have been.
@@watchm4ker I have a few different Raspberry Pi's and love them. It does carry on some of the spirit of the XO-1.
Someone in my local area was selling one of these on Craigslist last month. While it's a neat curiosity, I wasn't about to spend $800 on it.
Imagine my surprise (NOT!) when i heard that Steve Jobs declined to make an Open Source version of MacOS available for this project. 😆
I remember in 2007 seeing this and I felt like I was born 15 years too early.
My mom actually bought one of these for me when I was a kid. I found it weird and unusable; I didn't get the point of it.
The problem being that you had other better options. So a olpc laptop gave you nothing. If it was the only computer you had access to, you would have used it a lot. I mean its lightyears abov. What an 80's kid like me had growing up.
@@KonradZielinski You don't need to go so far back :D. Most world in 90's and still very big part in 00's.
Uruguay Nomah.
We used this machines around 2007 to 2014 in public schools since the government approved a plan which consisted of delivering one of this machines to each student of the country.
If I recall there where 3 variants of this machines this one shown here, an updated model with a plastic shielding around the keys and then there was a blue variant that was more powerful and it ran Gnome (if I'm not mistaking).
They weren't really good, but it could run Doom at least, there were even a few games made here for the machine by indie devs and some by the state, there were also a bunch of flash games compilations made by homebrew sites.
Haha! I owned one of these! (Still have it) I got it on my 4th birthday and there was a doom and sim city Clone on it. That basically was my gaming start. It wasn't terrible. Especially when you are that young
I remember thinking the OLPC thing was the coolest back when it was announced. I recall writing a thing about it for school. I had no idea about the subsequent versions though.
This brings back beautiful memories, I worked with the team as an ambassador for this project and we were able to deploy 4000 laptops to students in schools in underserved communities in NIgeria. We trained teaches and students to make this work, we enjoyed a good level of success.
Good Old Ceibalitas..! Intel's Classmate PC Initiative and the Raspberry Pi killed these projects completely.
the raspberry pi caters to a very different market segment to what these were made more, so not a fair comparison
@@DanafoxyVixen Both were adopted in educational environments both in developed and developing countries. It was the same market and this device got outclassed.
The unfair competition came from the Intel Classmate PC, but that was heavily subsidized by Intel and Microsoft as a means to prevent ARM, AMD, and Linux to make a dent in the next generation of computer users and operators.
Have any other laptops used an Li-Fe battery?
I always thought this was a cool idea, I still do. I'm not sure how big an impact it had but the device they came up with seems really well designed.
Not much battery Li-Fe, though 😉, at least in the first iteration
Had two of them fail; one straight out of the box and the other one after 3-4 years of use. I don't think they were very good.
That display is actually pretty dang sweet. I really like the idea of turning the backlight off and having it switch to a B&W readable mode for outdoor use.
The only thing I remember about this thing was it's cameo appearance in a SBemail as Homestar's computer
Yes! He did have one!
ah, a fellow HR fan.
I remember hearing about this! In 2007, as a Primary 4 (≈ 5th grade) student, I'd often have my dad save me the technology and Sunday comic sections from The Straits Times newspapers he would read* on Wednesdays and Sundays respectively, and I heard about the XO project through the former. News of the XO prototype was how I heard about Linux at the time, but I didn't know how to get a Linux distro at the time, later hearing about Ubuntu 7.10 through a later edition of that newspaper, and trying Ubuntu 8.04 inside VMware Player. Back then, Linux-based desktop OSes felt like a whole different world to me, and today, I live in that different world most of the time, still returning to Windows frequently for some developers like Evernote and others who don't offer their software on X/Wayland Linux/BSD, but do on Windows.
*He stopped doing that many years ago when he switched to reading through Nestia, and when other people share articles with him.
Alternative title: The Laptop That Has Shrek Ears
Man I had one of those, as Juanchis said im from Uruguay and all kids had one, I remember it had some kind of TV app on it that we would use to watch TV (Im not sure if it was IPTV) on the class but all the channels were from some obscure east europe country
You should do a longer video about the included software and OS. If I remember correctly it was all written in python and you where supposed to be able to right click and view source on just about anything. Good video, thanks you.
I remember seeing a commercial sponsoring fruit snacks like Fruit Gushers and Fruit Rollups for a contest where one kid climbs from his fence and running to Africa to deliver one of those laptops to a kid there.
6:12 The whole point of OLPC was to encourage experimentation and reward curiosity, hence the easy access to the parts underneath the GUI. I believe also the magnifying glass key actually means “view source”, as in “look at the source code for whatever is running now”.
One unusual thing about Sugar was its “journal” system, where you had a systemwide list of all the activities you had done recently, including links to the documents you had worked on.
The Sugar project is still active, even today. Packages are available in the standard Debian repo.
I mean this XO-1 Computer was meant for Education and runs a Custom Fedora Linux Distro OS known as OLPC OS using Sugar, the open-source desktop environment. I really like the design since it has 2 antennas almost like a router.
Imagine OLPC XO-10
4K amoled display
16GB RAM
512GB SSD
10 Hours + battery capacity
Windows 11
High end gaming
Wowww 🔥🔥🔥
I had 2 revisions (2010 and 2012 models) of these (my first one got replaced for a newer one) I loved it especially the second one since it had a ability to switch System, i remember emulating old windows stuff with wine and playing flash game compilations. So good memories. I wish I could get a new one
The primary school I work at here in Australia, we received 150 of these, didn't cost us a cent.
We got about 40 or so in 1 shipment, and then at a later date they supplied us with the rest of them.
They also supplied us with charging stands, and several repair kit boxes (New screens, keyboards, antennas, etc...).
All of ours initially came with Sugar, and BEFORE we were even allowed to receive any of the XO's, we had to nominate some teachers that had to have training for the SugarOS. Once the training was done, and we received the XO's, no other teacher was allowed to use them.
All our XO-4's came with the mesh capability, and they were using it quite extensively (This was around 2014).
Eventually we replaced Sugar with Android, but that was really the downfall of the XO, the Android interface just wasn't as nice to use compared to Sugar.
In the end, the OLPC contacted us (around 2018 I think it was), and asked us to return as many as we could, I still have a few left at the school, and still have all the repair kits they sent us.
I have several of these still. I really believed in the concept when they were announced and wanted to make apps and games for it. But it was pretty clear things were not going to work out. They neglected the growth of Netbook market that was ultimately doing better than what OLPC could do in terms of price and performance of the hardware.
On the software side, I think the problem was more fundamental. I saw the attitude of typical western way of thinking and just providing kids with edutainment level of softwares. I always argued it should be something that could lead for kids to directly work with everything that the workplace uses including the OS. The argument was that you can install Linux based equivalent of word processor, spreadsheet and so on.
I still wish it would have been a different story in the alternate history. Perhaps some sort of agreement could have been made for Apple to come up with a version of OS X that was open source... Or someone business savvy was in charge at OLPC to have more of a market ready model... :(
Microsoft choked it out by forcing vendors to only sell MIcrosoft operating systems.
Got to love them "lithium Iron" battery packs, although a bit heavy.
I had a coworker who got one of these through the give one get over program. It was an interesting idea.
Thank you so much for this review. We all know that project was a failure, but normal reviews just focus on that. You took the time to take it apart and analyse the components.
I vaguely remember reading about this in a magazine when I still was in primary school.
Nice to see a video about it after all that time, I almost forgot it completely.
I have two of these XO-1s that I got for free at a swap meet. Both were experiencing the firmware bug that plagued these models. When the CMOS battery drained, it reset the internal clock which then prevented the computer from powering on. Fortunately this bug can be fixed using a serial connection and updated firmware. I made a really basic video ages ago that I titled "Two Laptops Per Adult" documenting my experience with restoring these.
hmm, with all of its durability design and options for solar or hand-cranked power, this could make for a prepper's survival computer to stash away in the bunker
Oh dude, I remember REALLY wanting one of these as a kid.
Repairability 100%, compared with today’s products
I've long since forgotten about this project. The initial revisions made use of my crypto/math libraries to secure the bios(firmware) from tampering. That was an entire lifetime ago though geez hehehe.
Computers have gotten so much cheaper now, and you have the ability to download an archive of Wikipedia to a 60 gb file. Students can access an incredibly large body of knowledge offline through a smart phone, tablet, or laptop now. Only issue is electricity. Power banks are very cheap if you're using solar at the school, and i would imagine having a panel in rural homes would have benefits as well outside of simply charging a laptop or phone.
I remember seeing this campaign in what I think was a Go-Gurt commercial as a kid? I always thought it was super weird cause I'd never seen a laptop look like that.
Fun fact!
This laptop is the one Homestar Runner uses in Strong Bad Email 200: "Email Thunder"
This is during that time when we thought of all technology as 100% good, and we NEEDED to get them to people. Now we’re all trying to get offline
Still one of the projects I'm proudest to have been a part of in my life and that I was the saddest about it's failure. It might not have worked, but we had some damn good ideas that wound up paving the way for other things. What still gets me is that the hand crank wasn't a part of the machine by default like it was in all of the prototypes (battery life was always on the chopping block) and it wasn't quite as powerful as it needed to be even for educational uses. It could have been a killer dual purpose hacking/light gaming machine for on-the-go but it just wasn't powerful enough to do anything really useful. I still think putting those controller buttons on the face was a great idea. I'm shocked to hear it actually made some wide adoption, I remember the whole thing just fizzling out. I knew the project was over though when people kept insisting on shoving windows onto it and even some governments refusing to adopt the project without windows support. That wasn't what it was designed for at all but we see even today people refuse to break their x86 addiction. It's just the way these things go once they hit the mainstream, and this was a hard way to learn that for a lot of us. You can see the same thing happening today with so many people buying Raspberry Pi's just to use them as retro game machines and refusing to learn anything about the OS much less actually run it to transfer their roms. People might laugh at us and say we are wasting our time, but when the goal is noble and the cause is just it makes it all worth it.
I'm going to be the cynic here. The OLPC strikes me as another example of what privileged first world minds think when it comes to the needs of kids from developing nations. They design a ridiculous piece of underpowered hardware that ultimately is a compromised platform to learn on with an emphasis on ergonomics and durability that is not required but ends up eating much of their design and production budget. Kids don't need a glorified Fisher Price laptop, they benefit more with real hardware and operating systems to learn on. By the mid 2000s, there were plenty of low priced laptops that would have been good choices. The foundation could have focused on gathering corporate and government sponsorships to offset the costs of donating the hardware where it was needed, but instead they chose to spend their efforts and money on developing a bespoke hardware that was hopelessly weak and unsustainable. It got them more attention and press, but they could have achieved much more.
Funny how a tablet is more powerful and longer lasting than the 100$ laptop could ever be
These came out when I was 9 and starting to get more aware about charity initiatives and I thought they were the coolest thing
I remember the ads for this thing but never did know what happened to the project. And tbf it did get replaced by the rpi and various projects that utilize that. Especially the pitop that I think is still around and pines alternative XD
One of these chasis wil make a good Cyberdeck . Add a CM4 Motherboard , SSD , inbuilt SDR , paint or wrap it black .
I remember seeing announcements of these, including the concept with the built-in hand crank. But, I'm not aware of those here in Brazil.
The intentions were good, and the efforts were worth it, but, it really meant a lot of planning and cost cuts, which included performance.
If it was born a few years later, in the era of smartphones and tablets, with better and cheaper components, it probably would go further.
oh i remember these when i was in primary school at the age of 11, it was really bizarre when these were in all the year levels at my school dispite having normal laptops onsite anyway back in 2014.
And it hid an easter egg, too:
If you held the square button on boot, it would load Conway's Game Of Life.
Today it seems that a similar device would be worth its weight in gold. Priced at $ 100, of course. Remote learning needs cheap, simple computers for every child.
Buy tablets from China.
You've been able to buy tablets from China for under $100 for near a decade
First of all, thank you very much for introducing a topic I've never seen covered before. I think it would be interesting to put a team together and challenged them to hit that $100 mark through design changes and sourcing components. A lot of nations have components made cheaply by using a miserly paid work force and pocket the margin between cost and price. What if they can be convinced to sell some of those components at cost so that the poor of their own country as well as others could have computers.
already reached with the Pi 4. 35 to $70 depending on the RAM size - 4- 8GB
I remember seeing this on 60 minutes years and years ago. I think its a good idea but maybe it was a little bit ahead of its time.
I'd studied Sugar quite a bit before Android came out. I remember my shock. "I've seen this API before... tasks, activities, yes". It was much more efficient in python, too.
The Sugar Project still exists and is still going. Packages are available in Debian, and no doubt in derivatives, too.
I'd still like a tablet that could turn into e-ink like this
X2, cool feature
Thanks for reviewing this. You did an excellent job of capturing the OLPC story in a nutshell. I still have mine from the buy-1-give-1 program, and I still remember the struggles and trials of the program.
Man this is an impressive bit of kit honestly. Probably ahead of it's time really, but a similar initiative these days could probably be run with netbooks or a small laptop running linux.
Back in high-school I used to repair these. They were pretty fun to work with.
I had one as a backup for when I got grounded xD it watched RUclips so that was enough for me. I learned a lot about Linux from this little thing. Weren’t they supposed to have a dual screen one?
What I remember about these was that they only slightly predated the netbook craze. Around the time I was hearing about the XO1, Asus launched the EeePC line. For only $350 or so - less than the give-one-get-one cost - you got a smaller machine with a better keyboard, more RAM, and more storage, that was also a "normal" PC that you could easily get XP or a standard Linux running on. Prior to this, small machines commanded a huge premium - see the Toshiba Libretto and Sony Picturebook series for example.
I think at the time the desire for cheap PCs was heating up, but XO1's downfall was it's focus on children, leading many to just see it as a kids toy. But I feel the success of the OLPC project was encouraging the rest of the industry to get costs down, starting with netbooks and eventually trickling down to just about every laptop becoming cheaper and more affordable.
didnt they made the 4gb 701 for like 130$. that beat out them on price and specks.
I remember when these were first announced, It was a really good idea, I wish they could have achieved it more effectively. The raspberry pi I think has become more of a successor to this idea. $35 little computers you can do anything you want with that can connect up to just about any screen you can find. So for about $50 to $60 bucks you can get a computer up and running using an old tv a cheap mouse and keyboard with everything being stored on plentiful and cheap SD cards, the idea has kind of pushed forward. And unlike the OLPC initiative, Raspberry Pi had wider spread appeal in industry and general maker space that it just became possible to perpetuate itself far more than OLPC's XO-1 as it wasn't just a non-profit trying to bring computers for education to the 3rd world. Raspberry Pi was trying to bring computers and learning To anyone and everyone interested. The XO-1 is still an interesting piece of tech, with good ideas behind it.
ruclips.net/video/wFWbuj9JdiQ/видео.html Rasperry pi 4 with display....
I remember when my friends and I used to play with the XO the typical games of any XO of a student in Uruguay, such as Vascolet 4 or XA contra los cuatreros galácticos, or when the XO 4 v2 came out and it came with the option of starting on Android 4 or Ubuntu 16.4 LTS, those were very good times
The XO 4.0 v2 can't even run Ubuntu, it used Fedora 20 with MATE
Its crazy how android tablets that are far superior now can be had for sub $100 new
I knew one of the software devs working on this project and had some hands on time with a few different models. The wireless mesh was pretty cool because (if i remember correctly) they were working on allowing a group of the laptops to communicate and interact without any internet connection or routers.
jesus i forgot all about these. i remember seeing ads for this nonprofit on tv.
I remember seeing this in a book about technology, I never had one but I really wanted it because of all its gimmicks. it's as if you let a child design a device, and actually made all the features feasible.