I had an OLPC and lived with somebody who worked on the OLPC project at the time.
One of the more bizarre twists of the project was that, I think in part because of the well intentioned but incredibly naive liberal utopianism of the project, to use an existing computing paradigm (windows, mouse pointers, etc) would be a form of colonialism.
Therefore, to avoid being colonial oppressors, these educational laptops required a completely new desktop environment and computer interaction paradigm. Obviously, since the colonial computing environment uses lots of rectangles, everything in this decolonized paradigm would be circles. Lots and lots of circles. Obviously, this put the project massively behind schedule, and it was beaten to the punch by the flood of super cheap Asus "netbook" computers - which all ran Windows XP or Ubuntu Netbook Edition.
I finally became disillusioned after going to an incredibly cringey talk with Nicholas Negropente, where his answer about why do African children need laptops rather than vaccines was that we should imagine the beauty of a family in a hut gathered round the an OLPC reading Wikipedia together, or some such drivel. He was really out of his depth, and I think probably only got the project because of his brother's connections.
Still, I loved the OLPC. Cool toy, great screen. Once the Intel clones and the RPi came out, it became completely irrelevant though.
One of the more bizarre twists of the project was that, I think in part because of the well intentioned but incredibly naive liberal utopianism of the project, to use an existing computing paradigm (windows, mouse pointers, etc) would be a form of colonialism.
Therefore, to avoid being colonial oppressors, these educational laptops required a completely new desktop environment and computer interaction paradigm. Obviously, since the colonial computing environment uses lots of rectangles, everything in this decolonized paradigm would be circles. Lots and lots of circles. Obviously, this put the project massively behind schedule, and it was beaten to the punch by the flood of super cheap Asus "netbook" computers - which all ran Windows XP or Ubuntu Netbook Edition.
I finally became disillusioned after going to an incredibly cringey talk with Nicholas Negropente, where his answer about why do African children need laptops rather than vaccines was that we should imagine the beauty of a family in a hut gathered round the an OLPC reading Wikipedia together, or some such drivel. He was really out of his depth, and I think probably only got the project because of his brother's connections.
Still, I loved the OLPC. Cool toy, great screen. Once the Intel clones and the RPi came out, it became completely irrelevant though.