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OLPC’s $100 laptop was going to change the world

(www.theverge.com)
235 points ChrisArchitect | 27 comments | 16 Apr 18 14:55 UTC | HN request time: 0.613s | source | bottom
1. krupan ◴[16 Apr 18 16:35 UTC] No.16850305[source]▶
I don't know how they fared in 3rd world countries, but before OLPC every laptop was upwards of $800 dollars, if I remember right. There were small low-power laptops akin to OLPC's XO, but you had to pay a premium for those. The concept of a $100 laptop was revolutionary (even though, as I remember, they never really got the price below $200, but still!) and it spawned a whole slew of cheap small commercial laptops (generally called netbooks). Chromebooks are a direct descendant of the XO laptop.

I bought one when they came out in 2007 and there still isn't a laptop that I've seen that is a durable as the XO. My 3-year old at the time danced on top of it, threw it across the room, and dropped it countless times and it was just fine. It came with a complete repair manual and you could use standard tools to take it apart and put it back together, which I did for fun even though I never needed to. The membrane keyboard was almost unusable and eventually one of the kids that I let play with it dug their fingernail into the edge of a key and ripped it right off. It would have been easy to replace the membrane, but by then we weren't really using it much.

The screen was pretty nifty for its time. It was dual mode, backlit or frontlit. You could go outside on a sunny day, turn off the backlight and have a high-resolution frontlit, completely readable (though black and white) display. It didn't look amazing indoors and new phone screens are readable both indoors and out for the most part, but again for its time it was amazing.

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2. Kluny ◴[16 Apr 18 16:46 UTC] No.16850430[source]▶
> The screen was pretty nifty for its time. It was dual mode, backlit or frontlit. You could go outside on a sunny day, turn off the backlight and have a high-resolution frontlit, completely readable (though black and white) display.

I had no idea that was even possible. Are there any laptops available that have this feature now? I would kill to be able to write blog posts and work on my book or do terminal work outside on a sunny day.

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3. ghaff ◴[16 Apr 18 16:46 UTC] No.16850432[source]▶
OLPC certainly helped stimulate a push for cheaper laptops. As you say, they most directly live on in Chromebooks--which are at least reasonably successful, especially in education--by way of netbooks.

Netbooks are an interesting case too. They didn't succeed in the sense of ushering in Linux on the desktop for somewhat undersized and powered laptops. But they did help push laptops to lower price points, especially as price/performance got low-end laptops to the point where they didn't need to be underpowered to work.

And Raspberry Pis came onto the scene as well of course.

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4. ghaff ◴[16 Apr 18 16:50 UTC] No.16850484[source]▶
What you want is a laptop with an e-ink display. There isn't one AFAIK. The refresh rate is one big limitation. One could design a laptop specifically for writing and reading but it would be pretty special purpose. As I recall, the CTO of OLPC went off to try to make a display with e-ink characteristics that would be more suitable for laptops but wasn't able to bring anything to market.
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5. krupan ◴[16 Apr 18 16:52 UTC] No.16850505{3}[source]▶
Indeed she did try to make a business out of those displays:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pixel_Qi

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6. abawany ◴[16 Apr 18 16:52 UTC] No.16850506[source]▶
I believe they used Pixel Qi displays, which were transreflective. I love transreflective displays due to their ability to use ambient light to save power but since the colors don't 'pop' with these and the side-lighting creates uneven lighting, they never seem to get traction. My Sharp Zaurus SL5500 and Garmin Vivosmart HR have these displays and I love the battery life that accompanies them. Edit: Additionally, for a while Pixel Qi made their ~10" (1024x600) display available as a retrofit for netbooks, probably around 2012 or so if I recall.
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7. krupan ◴[16 Apr 18 16:56 UTC] No.16850549{3}[source]▶
To be clear, the XO's display was not e-ink. It was regular frontlit LCD with a fast refresh rate. The downside was that the backlit mode never looked very good indoors. If someone could fix that problem I bet we'd have that screen on every portable device.
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8. jzl ◴[16 Apr 18 17:01 UTC] No.16850612[source]▶
"Chromebooks are a direct descendant of the XO laptop."

Is there any written evidence of this in old tech articles, etc.? I totally believe this could be possible, but it also could be a simple case of convergent evolution.

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9. bronson ◴[16 Apr 18 17:11 UTC] No.16850699{4}[source]▶
No, it really didn't. And reflective outdoors looked even worse. In the shade, it was washed out and the colors were wrong. In the sun, it looked like a bizarre black-and-white rendition of something where, if you concentrated, you could guess what it was trying to display.

With a lot more development time maybe they could have fixed the problems. Maybe.

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10. Kluny ◴[16 Apr 18 17:15 UTC] No.16850745{4}[source]▶
Yeah, I would gladly take an e-ink display or a frontlit lcd. Either one would be great. The closest I've found to what I'm after is the Freewrite typewriter, which is stupid expensive.
11. mtgx ◴[16 Apr 18 17:16 UTC] No.16850753[source]▶
Not saying it was the biggest reason, but Microsoft was supposed to kill Windows XP around that time, and it went back on its decision when netbooks started appearing on the market. Windows Vista and even Windows 7 weren't very adequate for those machines performance-wise, but they thrived on Windows XP.
12. piracykills ◴[16 Apr 18 17:21 UTC] No.16850792[source]▶
There was a whole push for netbooks like the Asus EEE PC that happened around the same time as the original XO.
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13. burfog ◴[16 Apr 18 17:28 UTC] No.16850866{5}[source]▶
Did you switch modes? There was a mode switch.

In grayscale mode, you got 1200x900 resolution. That was about 200 dpi, so quite sharp for the day. (typical was more like 85 dpi back then)

In color mode, the screen was blurred. It was a 3x3 blur, without the typical pixel/subpixel distinction. Effective resolution was something like 692x519 based on the number of green pixels.

Color mode in the sunlight would look grey, but it was still blurry. You had to switch modes if you wanted the full 1200x900.

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14. dzhiurgis ◴[16 Apr 18 17:38 UTC] No.16850971[source]▶
Onyx eReaders are quite fancy, runs android, has pencil support, still pricey tho:

https://www.google.co.nz/amp/s/www.theverge.com/platform/amp...

15. bitwize ◴[16 Apr 18 17:51 UTC] No.16851110{3}[source]▶
It was an LCD display with near-retina resolution and a transflective screen. It could be backlit, but when it wasn't backlit, ambient light was enough to illuminate the display to readable levels.

PixelQi got as far as building working prototypes that could be installed in ordinary laptops, but no takers from the laptop industry.

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16. bitwize ◴[16 Apr 18 17:52 UTC] No.16851122{6}[source]▶
There was not a mode switch, at least not on my OLPC. You switched from color to B&W by turning the backlight brightness all the way down (thus shutting off the backlight).
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17. burfog ◴[16 Apr 18 17:56 UTC] No.16851147{7}[source]▶
That was a mode switch.

Turning backlight brightness all the way down was the mode switch as presented in the UI. Very old versions of the UI made it explicit. At the MMIO level of course, there was a bit that got toggled.

18. avhon1 ◴[16 Apr 18 18:34 UTC] No.16851518[source]▶
> Are there any laptops available that have this feature now?

Nope. At one point, there were two netbooks that could have an off-the-shelf [0] pixel qi display fitted into them [1].

> I would kill to be able to write blog posts and work on my book or do terminal work outside on a sunny day.

That's the main reason I keep my 2 OLPC XO-1 laptops around. I have Debian running on them, and am working to be able to use them for working out-of-doors.

I've read lots of comments on HN expressing similar interest. Maybe I should develop some hardware for that.

[0] https://www.adafruit.com/product/1303

[1] https://www.engadget.com/2010/07/19/how-to-install-pixel-qis...

19. avhon1 ◴[16 Apr 18 20:01 UTC] No.16852187[source]▶
If nothing else, I would say that chromebooks are a spiritual descendant of the OLPC. Inexpensive laptops with simple software marketed heavily towards education.
20. abawany ◴[17 Apr 18 02:01 UTC] No.16854800{4}[source]▶
There were few devices that offered them but never mainstream. Here is a snapshot of their page from 2014 that lists some of their partners: https://web.archive.org/web/20140228171904/http://pixelqi.co... - mostly industrial applications and one Android tablet [1].

[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Adam_tablet

21. chaostheory ◴[17 Apr 18 06:04 UTC] No.16855901[source]▶
Totally agree. The OLPC didn't fail if the goal was to lower the price of laptops. I would think it inspired the Chromebook.
22. telchar ◴[17 Apr 18 07:03 UTC] No.16856151{3}[source]▶
Yep, I had both an XO and an EEE in that order. The look on the university help desk tech's face when I brought the XO (running puppy Linux at the time) in to get a network cert install was fun. I recall moving from the XO to the EEE mainly because the latter was faster and more pleasant to type on. There were few other competing net books at the time.
23. ZenoArrow ◴[17 Apr 18 07:54 UTC] No.16856375{4}[source]▶
> "It was regular frontlit LCD with a fast refresh rate."

Are you suggesting the only difference is in the controller board? From what little I know about them the Pixel Qi screens use the same manufacturing techniques as standard LCD screens, but I'd still be inclined to believe that the screens are different from standard LCD screens.

24. ZenoArrow ◴[17 Apr 18 07:55 UTC] No.16856386{4}[source]▶
You can still buy the Pixel Qi screens today, through a company called Tripuso:

http://www.tripuso.com/index.html

25. rospaya ◴[17 Apr 18 13:40 UTC] No.16858157{3}[source]▶
> Sharp Zaurus SL5500

Just got flooded by nostalgia. My SL-C760 was a wonderful piece of hardware, and the level of software tweaking is still unmatched.

I'm missing hardware keyboards on smartphones very much.

26. boomlinde ◴[17 Apr 18 14:30 UTC] No.16858639{3}[source]▶
Then "direct descendants" is just a poor choice of words for describing an entirely different relationship.
27. ◴[17 Apr 18 15:52 UTC] No.16859478[source]▶