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

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235 points ChrisArchitect | 2 comments | 16 Apr 18 14:55 UTC | HN request time: 0s | source
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berg01 ◴[16 Apr 18 16:06 UTC] No.16849989[source]▶
I played with one back when it was just launched. Besides the innovative outdoor-friendly display it was an insanely bad experience. MIT Media Lab (and with that I mean Nicholas Negroponte) gone crazy.

The UX (both keyboard and software) was .. just awful.

replies(1): >>16850048 #
whitepoplar ◴[16 Apr 18 16:11 UTC] No.16850048[source]▶
Any chance you could comment further on this? What in particular made it bad?
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switchbak ◴[16 Apr 18 16:44 UTC] No.16850411[source]▶
I had one back in the day, and it was the worst computing experience I can remember. The keyboard was like what you'd find on a speak-and-spell, and the system had the performance of a low-end 486 under heavy swap.

I still don't understand why the system performed so poorly, I know a lot of Sugar was written in Python, but there must have been some very fundamental problems with it. Switching to an existing lightweight X window manager was a much better (but still not good) experience.

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1. floren ◴[16 Apr 18 17:17 UTC] No.16850765[source]▶
> I still don't understand why the system performed so poorly, I know a lot of Sugar was written in Python, but there must have been some very fundamental problems with it.

Fundamental problem identified. I believe the Inferno port tended to run better.

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2. avhon1 ◴[16 Apr 18 20:35 UTC] No.16852498[source]▶
> the Inferno port tended to run better.

Cool. I hadn't heard about this! It looks like it's being actively maintained on bitbucket, too! [0]

It looks like someone else also got Plan9 booting on the OLPC [1].

[0] https://bitbucket.org/inferno-os/inferno-os/

[1] http://gsoc.cat-v.org/people/ameya/blog/2007/08/19/1_Plan9_K...