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

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.

> 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.

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.

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.

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.

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.