An eReader That Was Tough, Weird, and Full of Potential: Remembering the OLPC XO

[tsgreer]

The One Laptop Per Child (OLPC) XO looked like a toy that escaped from a cartoon and accidentally signed up for serious world-saving duty way back in 2007. Bright white shell with green edges. Chunky green keyboard. Fold-out ears for Wi-Fi. Built like a tank that seemed to yell out “Tonka Tough!” (You may have to be old like me to get that reference.)

Built to survive dust, rain, hot classrooms, and kids who treated it like sports equipment. Ya could plug it into the wall, run it off its battery, feed it with a solar panel, or in early demos power it with hand cranks and pull-cord generators. The pitch was simple: one computer for every child in the developing world. And make them for less than $100.

But much of it was about reading and using it as an ereader.

The idea was meant to deal with a simple reality that in many poor schools there just are not enough books. Textbooks are ancient or torn. Libraries barely exist. So they turned the XO into a portable library. The screen rotated and flipped down until the whole thing became a flat tablet you could hold like an ebook reader, with game-pad buttons on the sides that turned into page-turn keys.

The display had a split personality. Mary Lou Jepsen, who led the display work, called it an ultra low power, sunlight readable screen and pushed the cost to about one third of a normal laptop panel at the time. In color mode it acted like a regular LCD. In black-and-white reflective mode it sipped power and stayed sharp under full sun. Kids could sit under a tree at noon and actually read, no glare, no washed-out letters.

Thick colored plastic instead of metal. Rounded, rubberized corners. Ports hidden behind flaps. A carry handle so it felt like a schoolbook you swung at your side. It was meant for small hands, dusty rooms, hot climates, and the constant cycle of being dropped, bumped, and dragged.

Toss it in a bag, drop it on the ground, wipe it off, keep going. The whole design assumed bad power and spotty connectivity, so the screen and power system kept working when infrastructure did not.

From the beginning, it was aimed at kids in rural Peru, Rwanda, Cambodia, Uruguay, and similar places where many children had never owned a single book, much less a computer. XOs were supposed to arrive in stacks, get handed out in class, then scatter into homes, streets, and fields. In that context, the bright colors and toy-like shape made perfect sense. The machine said “I belong to the child, not the teacher.”

On the software side it ran the Sugar interface, which turned everything into “activities” instead of classic apps. One core activity was simply called Read. It didn't live or die on internet access. Books could be through USB and/or SD cards. Once a book landed on a child’s machine, it stayed. No Amazon sneaking in and taking stuff back.

OLPC never hit its wild numbers, and it failed big time. The dream talked about hundreds of millions of laptops. Reality delivered only a few million. Some governments bought them and botched the rollout. Some schools got hardware without training. Test scores stayed stubborn. Critics called it a failure.

The little white and green brick never conquered the planet, but the idea behind it was still pretty cool. It tried to turn a kid’s first computer into a rugged, neon-colored library that could survive a long walk home and a power outage.

I have one, and it is a fun little beast. The screen really is pretty decent for reading, with a surprisingly nice font. It's kinda heavy though, which makes sense for something that doubled as a laptop and first rolled out 18 years ago.

Chromebooks soon started rolling out and sorta took over the "cheap laptop" market, and were better machines. And of course now, kids can just get a cheap tablet and have it in a tough child-friendly case. Still not sure any of that is as tough as this thing though.

Here are pics of mine:

[j.p.s]

Thanks for bringing back some fond memories. The OLPC was a great idea and it is a shame that it didn't pan out. I eagerly followed its progress and bought one as soon as the buy two get one offer came out. I was interested in trying reading ebooks and netbooks weren't working for that for me and the OLPC sounded perfect.

The screen was really good in any light, including full sunlight, but handheld ergonomics were never good for me and trying to read with it was clunky and unpleasant. Booting took forever and performance was inadequate for even simple tasks. But the experience convinced me that maybe the high price of a dedicated ereader might be justified. So I ended up jumping as soon as the K2 was released and that worked out so well that I got back into reading books after decades of reading one, or two, or no books per year. (As a kid, I was always reading library books, but a closed stacks university library broke my library habit and I never got it back.)

When it became clear that the OLPC wasn't going to make it I had hopes that the display technology would live on, but it is gone as well.

[Frogm4n]

Originally Posted by j.p.s

When it became clear that the OLPC wasn't going to make it I had hopes that the display technology would live on, but it is gone as well.

There was a person making modded Thinkpads with PixelQi panels: https://boingboing.net/2021/04/19/ol...n-the-sun.html

[tsgreer]

Originally Posted by j.p.s

Thanks for bringing back some fond memories. The OLPC was a great idea and it is a shame that it didn't pan out.

I still think the idea has real merit. We have cheap laptops and tablets now, but most of them are not built to survive kids throwing them around, and loaded with software that's geared towards learning. Plus, they're not deployed in any serious, coordinated way to help underprivileged students.

On top of that, too many schools and universities still lock education behind overpriced textbooks.

With today’s Raspberry Pi hardware and modern e-ink tech, it should be possible to build something tough, simple, and genuinely low-cost and pick up where OLPC left off.

The project was ahead of its time, but I don't think core ideas stopped being valid. I'd like to see something like it picked up again.

[tsgreer]

Originally Posted by Frogm4n

There was a person making modded Thinkpads with PixelQi panels: https://boingboing.net/2021/04/19/ol...n-the-sun.html

Didn't know about this. Thanks for that!

[Quoth]

The One Laptop Per Child (OLPC) XO was a poor design and the PixelQI screen was poor and hyped.

[tsgreer]

Originally Posted by Quoth

The One Laptop Per Child (OLPC) XO was a poor design and the PixelQI screen was poor and hyped.

I gotta disagree when it comes to the screen, IMO. The screen can be read in full sunlight, is fast and is really nice--especially for the time period.