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…

I live in Argentina. The OLPC came to Argentina to promote the project, at the same time as Uruguay our neighbors. The pressure from Intel/Microsoft to no adopt it was incredible. In record time there were cheap netbooks pre-installed with a reduced version of Windows including Office. They did lot of lobby, and while Uruguay choose the OLPC... Argentina went with the Wintel netbooks. I think that the project failed because it ignored the political aspects of the education system…

$100 laptop back then was absurdly absurdly cheap. still is! but much more so then. OLPC is still the most innovative, learnable, interseting attempt at creating a computing environment I've ever seen. a journal keeping track of what you did, so you could revisit. cross-laptop applications using mesh networking technologies to communicate & share computing spaces. the OS wasn't all built alone in a lab somewhere. it took the best technologies of the day, took what already was making linux…