Peru is the first country in the world to receive Windows based laptops through the OLPC program

Lima, Peru - September 15, 2008. - Today, José Antonio Chang Escobedo, Peru's Education Minister, announced the agreement between Microsoft and the One Laptop per Child Association (OLPC). This agreement aims to provide programs such as Windows XP and Office, as well as other educational resources, which will be made available on laptop computers for students. This makes Peru the first country in the world to have XO devices based on Microsoft Windows.

The agreement is part of a nine-month pilot project to integrate educational software, low-cost computing, and technology training into classrooms throughout Peru. This marks a significant milestone as the first Microsoft Windows-based XO deployment in the world, representing the first of ongoing pilots in key markets previously announced by Microsoft and OLPC in May of this year.

"We are extremely excited to take part in this historic educational pilot that will benefit school children throughout Peru," said José Antonio Chang Escobedo, Minister of Education in Peru. "Integrating technology into our school curriculum will help to advance our knowledge economy, improve access to information and will generate opportunities for our students, which, through governmental policies, aims to improve the learning process we are offering our children, as well as closing the digital divide which currently exists between schools in rural and urban areas."

"The world-class software offered through the Microsoft Student Innovation Suite coupled with the training offered through this project provides a powerful and well-supported set of tools to help young people realize their full potential. Along with the Ministry of Education of Peru and OLPC, we are delivering a complete, relevant and affordable educational computing solution to schoolchildren in Peru who will now have the opportunity to experience the benefits that technology can provide. As such, we underline the importance of transforming education as a fundamental goal of Microsoft Unlimited Potential, our ambitious effort to bring sustained social and economic opportunity to people who currently don't enjoy the benefits of technology", outlined Lieneke Schol, Public Sector Lead, Microsoft Multi Country Americas.

"This pilot in Peru represents an important milestone in the evolution of One Laptop per Child," said Charles Kane, President of One Laptop per Child. "It demonstrates our ability to collaborate with Microsoft to provide governments a choice of operating system on the XO laptop."

XO Laptops used in this pilot will come pre-installed with Windows in order to facilitate the OLPC's job of delivering them to the Ministry of Education of Peru, which will then provide them to school age children, to be used for educational purposes. They will be made available 24 hours a day, 7 days a week, throughout the useful life of the device and while the child follows through with the school calendar year.

The main advantage of the XOs with Microsoft Windows is that students can learn using a widely recognized universal tool which represents a window to the globalized world.

Offered through Microsoft Unlimited Potential, the Student Innovation Suite is a collection of Microsoft's best education software offerings designed to help implement sustainable technology programs in partnership with governments and non-governmental organizations that benefit students and transform the educational opportunities in their communities. The education suite includes Windows XP Pro, Microsoft Office 2003 Standard, and Learning Essentials 1.0 for Microsoft Office.

Although the project seemed threatened in early 2006 from all sides these were minor compared to the problems to come. The biggest concern at the time was lack of an LCD panel manufacturer, but Negroponte and CTO Mary Lou Jepsen managed to charm another eccentric Taiwanese billionaire. Wen-Long Hsu—founder of southern Taiwan’s Chi-Mei conglomerate—is the owner of the world's largest collection of Stradivarius violins, and he played one for them when they visited to sign contracts.

By the fall, everything was working great in prototype form. Quanta agreed to run its first batch, and even agreed to run a suspend-resume hibernation test cycle 1000 times on each test machine. Normally, test units were give this cycle four times, so it was a particularly unusual request. Then, at 3am on the first day of mass production, Jepsen got a call. Everything was shut down; the laptops were going to sleep and not waking up.

"All hell was breaking loose." She hauled ass to the manufacturing lab with a few other guys and started pumping the caffeine.

Eventually a Quanta guy named Gary Chang and an OLPC guy named Richard Smith ("He's from Arkansas, looks like surfer dude") solved the problem. "We were calling it the second shot from the grassy knoll," says Jepsen. Apparently, as the system was shutting down, electromagnetic noise was corrupting data, screwing up the instructions that told the thing how to wake up again.

At around the same time, the maker of the wireless chips, Marvell, decided to update the firmware for the radio, and they started to crash. "We had four people in four time zones working on that problem," said networking engineer Michail Bletsas. "Mark Foster in Taipei, me in Boston, someone in India, and someone in Santa Clara. We had to program a workaround on the fly: It's in the radio, something you're not supposed to touch under normal consequences."

"A lot of those stories weren't told," says Jepsen. "We weren't hiding it, everybody knew, but we weren't broadcasting it. We figured it all out, and shipped a million of them."

Threat Level Rising
By late 2006, Intel had finalized its specs for the Classmate PC. Though it would cost $30 to $40 more than the XO—the "$100 laptop" in the end cost $188—the Classmate had a faster processor, Intel brand equity and the option of Windows XP as the OS. (Bulk buyers could also opt for Linux.) It was seductive in that it wasn't the revolutionary product that the XO was, but something more familiar, and in line with what ministers of education might have been considering already. What's more, it was a reference design that regional companies could license and customize to fit their needs. And, perhaps, countries rife with pirated software infrastructure had plenty of free programs to run from the black market.

As it began pilot program, Intel's strategy was seen as more traditional too: Laptops could go to teachers, or loaned to students. It did not enforce Negroponte's logical but strict mandate, that the laptops be given to the children, and that they should only be deployed when there are enough to go around.

In the middle of 2007, Intel and OLPC entered into a partnership that was probably more of a hindrance to each other's initiatives than any sort of help. From the start, the deal was vague, more of a mutual appreciation society than a true strategic alliance. Six months later, it had dissolved in acrimony. OLPC accused Intel of pitching Classmate to would-be XO customers; Intel griped that OLPC wouldn't stop asking that the Classmate be discontinued in favor of the XO.

Meanwhile, Intel's more profit-minded operatives were hanging out in Taiwan, spinning the baby laptop idea to one of Quanta's arch competitors, a little known company called Asus.
On June 8, 2007, while both the XO and the Classmate were still deep in pilot testing, Asus introduced the Eee PC, a $400 mini-notebook running a warm-n-fuzzy flavor of Linux. Not only did it resemble the Classmate more than a little, it was unveiled at a press conference hosted by none other than Intel. It would be ready for sale worldwide by that winter, and when it did become available, boy did it sell like hotcakes.

Sales Figures, Sales Facts
"Selling like hotcakes" is an expression that doesn't mean anything in particular. In many cases, "selling a million" doesn't really mean anything specific either. I've heard OLPC people say they've hit the million mark, but in terms of actual shipments, it's not true.

Due to issues that have nothing to do with hardware—and largely to do with Negroponte's greater mission of educating the world's poor—the XO spent most of 2007 in beta testing. In early November, OLPC launched the "Give 1 Get 1" $400 charitable promotion for US buyers, but the first real bonafide XO deployment happened in Uruguay in on December 1. Confirmed orders might have topped a million at this point, but the number of existing XOs, both sold in the US and deployed en masse to schoolchildren in Peru and Uruguay, hovers around 500,000.

Ask Intel how many Classmate PCs are out in the wild, and you get a vague stat, somewhere in the "hundreds of thousands." Intel, too, promises large numbers to come. Portugal will be buying 500,000 of them for the coming school year, for instance.

The Eee PC, though, is already nearing 2 million sold, having hit 1.7 million in the first half of 2008. It is on target to reach a promised goal of 5 million by the end of the year. (By contrast, OLPC will most assuredly not reach 1 million by the end of 2008.)

The success of the mini notebooks has largely been due to price (even expensive ones rarely touch $600) and their intentionally internet-friendly design (you're not going to load up Photoshop CS3, but browsing and email checking work fine). They are also boosted by the negativity surrounding Windows Vista: By running Linux or Windows XP, they present a desirable alternative to the bulkier, more expensive, resource-heavy machines required to run Microsoft's latest OS.

In the wake of the Eee's success, over 40 mini notebooks have hit the market over night. The top four best-selling notebooks on Amazon fall into this catetgory.

At this point, even if the millions of third-world students eventually get laptops, it's unlikely that the XO will be the one they receive. Still, the past two years are definitive proof that Negroponte can take credit for the birth of an entirely new kind of PC.

And Negroponte does claim credit for the Eee PC's success. In fact, he says it's why he introduced the next version of the XO laptop—a radical two-touchscreen device aimed at a $75 pricetag—so early.

Encore?
I asked him why, with the first XO so clearly in its early stages of shipment, would he show off the XO-2. Sure, he doesn't have customers at Best Buy who may hold off because they know what's coming, but it seemed to take away from the momentum of the original device, not to mention confirming some of its criticisms (underpowered, cramped keyboard, etc.).

"When we announce something now that will be in play two years from now, it's partly to give the manufacturers something to start copying now," he says, elaborating, "If you go back two years and you look at the press, [the XO] was dismissed, it was not possible. Then came the Classmate, then Asus. If I underestimated anything, it was how fast people would [copy] it, even if they didn't get down to the same price or didn't have the same features. It was a movement—a hardware trend—that happened because of OLPC."

He also hopes that the announcement of the XO-2 concept, one that only exists in pictures, will stimulate small developers who work on components. Jepsen's new company Pixel Qi will focus on the next-generation of LCD touchscreen, one that can be made as cheaply as current screens today, but have capacitive touch built right into the active matrix, making it thinner than an iPhone screen. Others who saw the XO-2 renderings have already begun pitching solutions to the group.

Not a Manager
If there's one criticism made against Negroponte that's indisputable, is that he changes his tune.

In the beginning, Negroponte repeatedly affirmed that the XO was to run "Linux or some other open source operating system." After a long struggle that could easily be the subject of another series, the XO has recently been made capable of booting both its own Linux OS with Sugar interface, as well as Windows XP. (Critics say that Negroponte never allowed OLPC's Linux OS to mature so that it could stand up to pressure from the Windows advocates.)

Likewise, he was adamant at the beginning that his laptop be the only one shipped to these third-world educational programs where there isn't so much a "market" as there is a case for charity. He says now that if there is a true market—schools and families with the means and desire to buy their own laptops—others can serve it.

Inside OLPC, the leader's mercurial nature and changing priorities proved too much for the talent he had assembled. On the software side, Walter Bender and Ivan Krstic left after open disagreements with Negroponte—mostly pertaining to the adoption of Windows, but also to the overall goals of the program. Jepsen left in January 2008 in what she says was an amicable split, though other hardware experts including laptop maestro Mark Foster had abandoned ship earlier, possibly because they couldn't get along with Jepsen. Most people seem rankled by the credit that Yves Behar took as the "OLPC designer," most notably in a Wired article that would seem laughable to anyone who read Part 1 and Part 2 of this series.

When talking to staff members, there is a sense that no one really got along, and that the religion that Negroponte had instilled in his lieutenants, enough to get them to hang together for two years, has dissipated. The rocky Intel alliance and the move toward Windows were just the final disillusionments. Negroponte spoke the painfully obvious to BusinessWeek last March: "I am not a CEO. Management, administration and details are my weaknesses."

Pulling an Obi-Wan
Still, Negroponte and whoever has stuck by him charge onward. He said, to us and to others, "OLPC is not a laptop company." He himself said that to be taken seriously, you have to build hundreds of thousands of laptops every month; Quanta currently outputs a reliable stream of around 50,000 per month. Now that the mini-notebook movement is in full swing commercially, perhaps the focus should veer from hardware development. Why then stay in the hardware game? Perhaps it's telling that, on the OLPC website's own "Progress" page, nothing is mentioned after December 2007.

Bletsas—who remains hard at work on OLPC today—says that if OLPC does not stay in business, the laptop makers who followed the XO design cues will start doing what they do best: bumping the specs, upping the prices and keeping product too expensive for the foundation to use it in its educational mission. "Unless we keep designing, showing the world it's doable, I don't think they will follow in that path," he says. "If we stop at this stage, they are not going to come down enough for us to use their machines. We have to push them at least one step further."

Want more on OLPC's secret origins? Jump back to the earlier sections:
Part 1 - Genius, Hubris and the Birth of the Netbook
Part 2 - US and Taiwan's Hardware Lovechild

In November of 2005, Nicholas Negroponte and his OLPC CTO Mary Lou Jepsen traveled to Tunisia for the UN-sponsored World Summit on the Information Society, where they were able to present a "working" $100 laptop concept to Kofi Annan, UN secretary general. No longer did the machine rely on that pop-up rear-projection display; it was smaller, made of green plastic, and had a crank for the kids to work—for 10 straight minutes per hour of use—when they had no other access to electricity. It was a vast improvement over that January's pup-tent rear-projection laptop, hampered only by the fact that it was an absolute fake.

One attendee described it as a "balsa model with a keyboard and an LCD with a thick cable attached to a box under the counter." Others noted that the screen froze up during Negroponte's demo. Worst of all, when Annan himself approached the device with the sole intention of making Negroponte and his mission look good, the secretary general broke the crank handle. Clean off. Overnight, the broken handle story became an internet vote of no confidence. It was time to make this concept into something that would work. And that would take help.

Make It So?
As we covered in Part 1, whether Quanta founder Barry Lam's deal was a charitable donation or a crafty decision to get some fresh MIT thinking into his own laboratories, the dreamers from Cambridge started in earnest with the best laptop engineers in the world. Jepsen and others spent two years shuttling back and forth from Cambridge, MA to Taipei, Taiwan. (She actually filed her income tax return as a Taiwanese resident in 2006.) The American scientists would bring ideas to Quanta's engineers, who would either approve them, or disapprove.

"Oftentimes I'd be presenting my ideas in this large boardroom with five EVPs on one side and five EVPs on the other side, and they would point out reasons it wouldn't work, things I couldn't have known, that are somewhat trade secret. I would take these down, saying 'These are really good points—when I have answers, can I come back and present them to you?' In three months, I'd come back for more."

As engaging a process it was for the Americans, it seems that Quanta's people were a little annoyed by the game, at least according to what Quanta's OLPC overseer Dandy Hsu told a reporter from Taiwan Review. For one thing, OLPC didn't order up its laptop from Quanta's speedy-delivery menu, like the big brands do. And for another, OLPC's unfinished OS made motherboard testing a huge pain. "This made the process long and complicated," Hsu told Taiwan Review. "We'd make assumptions in the design, but later, when we got the software, we would need to make changes to the hardware."

What Hsu didn't tell the Taiwan Review was that throughout this process, any motherboard changes made by the OLPC team—that is, some of MIT's brightest minds— were added to Quanta's reference design, and therefore its intellectual property. Quanta had 100 staffers on OLPC on a regular basis, and perhaps 200 at peak times, but it got some good R&D in return. Quanta built a consumer-friendly prototype of the XO to add to its menu—one that has become a standard netbook reference design—and OLPC can't challenge the company to a patent dispute.

As much as it sounds like a Terminator movie, it's true: Quanta could use the XO's own blueprints to build something that could destroy it.

Big Differences
The point of OLPC's hardware endeavor was to create a laptop that didn't resemble all the others out there. In spite of the ambitious $100 target price tag, the largest constraint on product design was not cost but power consumption. Because CPUs tend to draw as little as 1-2 watts of power, while screens draw 7 watts at the minimum, the radical idea was to build the rest of the system around the screen. Cheap, safe battery design and energy efficient wireless connectivity added to the challenge.

Green Inside and Out
In the early days, when Negroponte and crew were talking to manufacturers, a big laptop maker—"who shall remain nameless," says Jepsen—told them that it would cost $25 to $30 extra to make them green. "We made the difficult decision that we couldn't afford it, but also vowed to do the right thing at every step of the line to make them environmentally friendly." Because they were choosing parts from scratch, and because they adhered to the "reduction of hazardous substances" (ROHS) standard, the XO became the greenest laptop ever made. Though many colors were tested out, the "playful" green and white design that was chosen was perhaps the most fitting. (Though I still kinda like the red limited-run ones I saw at OLPC headquarters.)

Battery
"Normal laptops use lithium ion, but every six months or so, there's a large recall because sometimes, in bad batches, they explode," says Jepsen, arguing that they wanted to "go the extra mile on safety." So, if they couldn't use batteries that occasionally blew up and burned at 1000º C—and nickel metal hydride was too expensive thanks to a precious metals boom—what was left?

The answer, one that Quanta brought to the table, was lithium ferrophosphate. It rarely explodes, and burns at a slightly less painful 100º C in a fire, and it has a very long life, 2000 charge/recharge cycles. Most laptop makers aren't into it, since its charge density is light—it's currently more often considered for electric cars. Still, because the OLPC team believed they only needed a low-power battery, they opted for it, ordering up a battery that produces just 20-watt-hours, versus a typical laptop battery's 80-watt-hours, and has no circuitry of its own so the replacement cost is very low. Those perceived benefits, particularly the lack of circuitry, have been called into question, though, because the XO doesn't get the battery life it's supposed to. NiMH may be a tad greener overall, but according to Jepsen, "there's some suggestion that [the lithium ferrophosphate] decomposes into fertilizer."

CPU
The team figured out that they could save an awful lot of energy by having the CPU flick off in tenth of a second when it wasn't needed, and power up again when something demanded its attention. Jepsen says this would be deemed heresy at Intel, but they wouldn't hesitate to shut the screen off. The complexity, in Bletsas' mind, was that there are three different sets of firmware all interrelating: the main one that runs the show, the embedded controller chip for the keyboard, and the networking chip, which has its own CPU. In the end, the on-and-off flickering power-saving innovation hasn't fully worked on the Linux OS, but it apparently does work when the system is running Windows XP, so the issues are considered software problems.

Networking
The Wi-Fi radio works independently of the CPU because it has to form the XO mesh network. A big part of Negroponte's dream, this network is famously intended to blanket a town so children's data can easily be shared, even when given computers are in a state of rest. This caused a problem for the component, a USB device, and required tricking the radio to stay awake when its master went to sleep. "It took many tries to get that right," says Bletsas. Also, because of the USB interface, the flicking on and off of the CPU played havoc.

Those Little Antennae
The XO wouldn't be the XO without its hallmark green antennae, an attribute that gives it a ridiculous Wi-Fi advantage over, say, a MacBook Pro. The MBP's aluminum body is actually especially bad for radio transmission, says Bletsas, OLPC's networking guru. It was he who argued strenuously for the antennae, as you can see in his none-too-artful sketch: Though Bletsas proved that such a placement would double the wireless reach of the XO without demanding a milliwatt of additional power, the request didn't make designer Behar terribly happy: "Two ugly antennae to place on top of a laptop?" he recalls. "It was a huge challenge." Luckily the team turned those pointy green lemons into lemonade. "We used them to give the laptop personality, make it look friendly and fun," says Behar. "It became an icon for the laptop." As you can see, they were almost little stubby things, less rabbit, more cat:

Keyboard
One of the most underrated developments on the XO is the keyboard. Admittedly it's a little tricky to type on it with grown-up hands, but it's the only keyboard that is shows Ethiopian characters and layout, for instance, and it can be easily configured for other languages and dialects as well. The process is achieved through screen printing. "With one single printing pass, we can very quickly localize the keyboard," says Behar. It can be modified in low quantities and reasonably quickly too, with only a month or so leeway to set it up.

Screen
Beside the ears and the impressive mesh network, the screen was a signature trait for the XO, and one of the only innovations that merited some solid patent applications. For starters, the flickering CPU meant something had to be done to keep the screen from strobing as well. The team designed a controller chip with onboard memory which kept the images on the screen alive.

More importantly, the LCD panel itself, though it came straight from a plain-vanilla LCD fab, had some never-before-seen twists: In basic use, the $35 component displays color at a resolution of 800x600 pixels, with a backlight so that it's easy to see indoors. However, when outside, a switch can change it to a completely different screen, one that is monochrome, uses reflectivity to conserve power and improve visibility, and has a far tighter resolution of 1200x900 pixels.

Though she was OLPC's chief technology officer, this is Jepsen's claim to fame—some people on the internet refer to it simply as "Mary Lou's screen." Even critics who don't wish to give Jepsen undue credit for the whole XO laptop say that without her LCD breakthrough, the screen would have cost at least $20 more, would have had far fewer pixels, and probably would've tied up the development for six extra months.

Triple Trouble
It didn't take long, though, before OLPC got totally hosed. It started in March 2006, when Quanta was about to mass produce the first run of XO motherboards. OLPC has surveyed a poll of potential buyers in various developing countries, who overwhelmingly asked for a faster processor. That isn't an easy fix, especially when you're about ready to go into mass production. You can almost hear the guys at Quanta saying, "Something that would have been nice to know last year!!"

Then, Quanta screwed over OLPC by selling off its display division. As we mentioned in Part 1, the screen is the most expensive component, and the OLPC had designed a really special one to keep prices down. Quanta's owner Barry Lam may have loved the mission, but business was business, and when he sold the LCD plant, the company who bought it told OLPC to screw off. As Jepsen was returning home, she was not just exhausted and disappointed, but fell ill with adrenal failure. Her flight to Boston was forced to make an emergency landing.

With Jepsen barely on the mend, and a whole new stack of problems to solve for everybody, OLPC took a third blow square in the jaw: In May 2006, Intel announced it would go into the business of building laptops for teachers and students in third-world countries. Sound familiar? CEO Paul Otellini even showed off a prototype of the more powerful "Eduwise" laptop, soon to be (wisely) renamed Classmate PC. It was the first of many spiritual clones of the XO, and the beginning of even tougher times ahead for Negroponte and his team who hoped to ship millions of their own laptops.

Come back tomorrow for Part 3, the final installment of OLPC Secret Origins. If you're just jumping in, hop back to Part 1, where Negroponte announces his dream and pulls his team together.

From the moment Nicholas Negroponte showed off his $100 laptop concept at the Davos world economic summit in January 2005, it was as if the tech world's supermoguls were glowering down on him in judgment. Over the course of the year, Craig Barrett, Michael Dell, Bill Gates and Steve Jobs weighed in, privately declining support and in some cases publicly disparaging the idea.

The naysayers had a point. The mockup Negroponte was toting around that winter was one ugly baby. It aimed to reach the $100 price tag by having a slower processor, a skinnier internal drive, a smaller body and let's not forget that tent-like rear-projection screen that made it look like the conceptual heir to the pop-top VW Vanagon camper. But after three and a half years, Negroponte's crazy idea hasn't only produced the XO, a real laptop co-developed and manufactured by the world's largest notebook maker, it's also become a product most of Negroponte's opponents are now copying.

After interviewing Negroponte himself, along with his original CTO Mary Lou Jepsen, designer Yves Behar, advanced technologies VP Michail Bletsas and others, we can explain how this proposed global humanitarian effort may in fact be more successful as a revolution in hardware design, and how OLPC will continue to influence the hardware you buy, even if you never score an actual XO.

Negroponte—generally Nicholas, occasionally Nick—is a man who is used to coming up with ideas that people laugh at, only to prove them wrong later. He established the not-for-profit One Laptop Per Child organization after years of exploring the more general subject of providing computers for the youth in the world's poorest countries, and he is at the center of any attention that OLPC receives. He has billionaires and heads-of-state on speed dial, and likes to make unusual requests of them. (He may have lacked support from tech's most powerful, but Negroponte's venture had backing from Rupert Murdoch, AMD's Hector Ruiz and others from its inception.)

Sometime in the early spring of 2004, the Negropontes invited Nicholas' MIT colleague Michail Bletsas and his wife over for a dinner of wild turkey—the infrequently eaten northeastern bird, that is, and not the whisky. Shortly after burning Bletsas with the molten sugary part of a freshly baked apple pie during the dessert course, Negroponte announced a secret that had been burning inside him for months: He had dreamed up an ultra-cheap laptop for kids, and he planned to spend the rest of his life working on it.

To say Negroponte is arrogant is to say the Pope has a pointy hat: He founded MIT's Media Lab, for God's sake. He is one of the only people on earth who could have made the XO. But the larger mission of the XO, to become a stimulant of learning and creativity for the world's poorest children before they necessarily have access to electricity and internet connectivity—let alone clean drinking water—that idea has yet to prove itself, and possibly never will.

White Box Syndrome
Negroponte was convinced that you couldn't just go out and buy the kind of laptop he had in mind. Prices are always trending downward, but manufacturers are always countering that by upping specs and adding features. Profit margins remain super-tight, achieved only by reducing costs at the rate of 20% each year.

"There are two ways to make an inexpensive laptop. One way is to take cheap components, cheap labor, cheap design and make a cheap laptop," says Negroponte. "We decided to do the opposite: Cool design and very advanced manufacturing techniques where you pour raw materials in one end, and out come iPods out the other end. That approach is normally not the one taken in the developing world." Typically in poor rural areas, he says, "you see very inexpensive 'white boxes' that are near garbage, both in terms of design and manufacturing."

Negroponte says sending our used PCs to poor countries is the computing equivalent of sending old polluting, gas-hungry cars. Needless to say, computer companies and automakers alike don't generally spend money to design an intentionally cheap product geared for third-world deployment that makes use of the latest engineering breakthroughs and consists of green, easily recycled materials.

The Display's the Thing
The display is the costliest element in a laptop, especially one targeted at $100, so Negroponte knew it needed to be the priority. One of his earliest confidantes (and OLPC board members) was Joseph Jacobson, the man behind E-Ink, so it's no surprise that the highly efficient display tech was an early contender. It failed on three orders, however: Its price never came down—one early target was apparently $12 per screen, eventually revised up to $35—its refresh rate was, and is, too slow for a graphic user interface and color, a user requirement for this dare-to-be-creative contraption, just didn't look right.Another alternative display option quickly failed as well. In 2004, microdisplay chips like TI's DLP were heralded as the Next Big Thing in rear-projection TV technology, a low-cost, lightweight competitor to plasma and LCD. Intel had just invested a lot of money in a DLP competitor called liquid crystal on silicon, and Negroponte wanted to use that for a cheap pop-up rear-projection screen (shown above). Almost as soon as it was announced, however, the LCOS initiative crashed and burned in a spectacular failure, though not before the LCOS-based $100-laptop prototype was mocked up. (CE companies have discontinued most microdisplay TV lines, though they still use LCOS in many high-performance home-theater projectors.)

Team Up
The best thing to come out of the failed Intel mindmeld was Mary Lou Jepsen. She had spent a lot of time working on screens, but had never before designed a laptop. In 2005, Negroponte named her CTO and charged her with developing the screen—a new kind of LCD—around which the processor, keyboard, memory and network would wrap.

At that same time, Negroponte hunted for other ninjas of computer engineering to complete his dream team.

Walter Bender, one of Negroponte's closest MIT collaborators, signed on as president of OLPC, concentrating on the software side and its innovative Sugar user interface. (Owing mainly to its own all-too-dramatic arc, we do not delve into the software history at length in this story.) Mark Foster, a former VP of Apple's notebook division, co-captained the hardware initiative; Bletsas managed the innovative wireless network; and others—Mitch Bradley, John Watlington, Richard Smith and Ivan Krstic to name just a few more—all joined in to work countless hours on this radical, ambitious project.

As the technical plan was being hashed out, Negroponte hired industrial designers—first, a firm called Design Continuum, and then, a bit later, Yves Behar—in order to shape both the brand and the aesthetic of the XO itself.

The US team was set; now all Negroponte had to do was find a company willing to manufacture the sucker. It seems it's one thing to persuade a bunch of wild-eyed technologists that it's time for them to try to change the world, but another thing altogether to get corporations, especially ones with stockholders, to drop everything for a charity.

Though the number of advanced degrees gathered together could fill a phonebook, the amount of ego pressure building up in OLPC HQ proved, eventually, enough to blow the roof off.

One Factory, Many Brands
"Early on," Jepsen recalls, "I tried to get one of the largest laptop brands to sponsor the program. They said no. They looked at my design and said, 'This design would require at least 15 miracles and we have this rule around here, one miracle per product. We're going to pass, but keep in touch!' It was a very nice sort of rejection." She adds, "They were dead right, one miracle per product was a pretty good rule for a product. But this wasn't a product, it was a global humanitarian effort."

Today, a handful of companies in China and Taiwan make pretty much everything. One of the names that frequently pops is Quanta, attributed (often unofficially) with building flagship products for Apple, Dell and others. It makes around 40 million laptops per year, at profits of around $20 per machine.

On one hand, this promotes a sort of malaise. Cookie-cutter manufacturing makes sense to Quanta, since less retooling and larger manufacturing lines spell more profit. But these contract manufacturers increasingly design the products they make for others, at least as far as the engineering goes. As one of the world's hottest melting pots for new ideas, Quanta's design center was the perfect place to take a radical new idea for a laptop. Negroponte knew they might be a little booked, but he had a plan.

Made in Taiwan
Barry Lam is as successful a soothsayer as you can be in modern times. In the late 1980s, he parlayed a small fortune he made from the personal-calculator boom for a venture in the burgeoning industry of laptop computers. Today, he is easily among the 500 richest people in the world, and Quanta, his baby, is the largest laptop manufacturer in the world.

When Quanta announced in fall 2005 that it had won the contract to build Negroponte's $100 laptop, the phrasing seemed a little strange. Quanta had, according to some reports, turned down the project twice before agreeing. Yet the Taipei Times reported that it was OLPC who said "yes" to Quanta: "The decision was made yesterday after the OLPC's board of directors reviewed bids from several possible manufacturing companies," naming contract manufacturers Compal, Inventec and Wistron. How could a total charity case have been at the center of a corporate bidding war?

The company went on to reassure stockholders that this wasn't a money-losing endeavor. The company said it would benefit by "reinventing cost-saving production" through R&D collaboration with AMD and other companies—a clear indicator of losses in the immediate future.

Back at OLPC headquarters, the story makes a little more sense. Though Lam has yet to turn 60—a mere child by Asian business-mogul standards—he was apparently seeking something more spiritually rewarding than just being best laptop maker ten years running, and something about the proposal finally sunk in. "Lam was concerned with his legacy," says Bletsas. "He liked the product, and he didn't care about the financial aspects as much as he cared about the humanitarian cause."

Negroponte visited him in Taipei; they probably met up in the art gallery Lam set up on the top floor of his corporate headquarters, surrounded by magnificent works of Asian art. After a polite discussion, the billionaire-to-visionary tete-a-tete apparently concluded as follows: "He said, 'I don't care if I'm gonna get my money's worth out of it.' It took a strong founder"—that is, someone who could make an unpopular decision and not catch flak for it—"but he bought on the idea, and said, 'Let's work out the details.'"

It turned out to be a shrewd business decision by Lam. The question—one that may never get a straight answer—is whether or not he knew it at the time.

Stay tuned for Part 2 of the OLPC Untold Story...

Intel had a couple of Classmate 2s set out as well, which looks admittedly dated next to the tablet. The new design takes some cues from popular netbooks like the EeePC and the MSI Wind, with an emphasis on slimness and a forward-sloping keyboard. The case, though still in development, looks more businesslike than its predecessor. There's a new webcam that with vertical tilt capability, and a nifty home button on the screen's bezel that returns the user to the desktop. Speaking of the desktop, the Classmate still runs XP, and Intel has built a simple dashboard with commonly used icons for easy touch access, though using XP's regular functions with your fingers won't be any easier than on other touchscreen tablets. A stylus is included.
The fact that it looks and behaves like a consumer subnotebook is bewildering. Without a dedicated educational OS, multitouch or even kid-friendly looks the Classmate seems to have veered off into overcrowded netbook territory. It seems plenty functional as a compact tablet though, so if the price is right it could well succeed at that. The device is still in development, so at least Intel theoretically has a chance that make this thing interesting. [Giz at IDF]

The current Classmate PC fits a traditional form-factor and has been moderately successful, if not dominant, in its intended market. Without a truly unique design or an adequately modified (or new) operating system, the first and second generations of the Classmate amounted to little more than a very cheap laptop. Switching to a tablet-style design and relying on nontraditional input methods could push the new Classmate (or whatever this is) over the edge as the de facto digital teaching device for the developing world. That, and a ridiculously low price. In any case, we'll be at tomorrow's IDF keynote when this little tease gets filled out. [Laptop Mag]

An interview with Valerio Cometti, the founder and managing director of V12 Design, confirmed that the upcoming version would support multitouch input and that a microphone would be built into the design for voice commands. Unfortunately, the image pictured above is the first gen version and no images of the current Canova design have been released. However, if they are on target with their prediction, we could have one in our hands by 2010. [V12 Design via Laptop Mag]

This is one more step towards Negroponte's goal of getting technology into third world and developing countries. It also marks the first move into Colombia. And no, including a copy of "Dope Wars" on every Colombian OLPC would NOT be OK. Shame on you, reader, for suggesting that. [OLPC on Giz]

COLOMBIA SIGNS AGREEMENT TO PURCHASE 65,000 XO LAPTOPS

Cambridge, Mass., May 29, 2008 - One Laptop per Child (OLPC), a non-profit organization focused on providing educational tools to help children in developing countries "learn learning," announced today that the State of Caldas, Colombia, has signed a purchase agreement for 65,000 XO laptop computers to be distributed to children in one of the country's most important coffee-growing regions.

Upon signing the purchase order, Caldas's Governor Mario Aristizabal, said, "My government and our State legislators are fully committed to giving each and every child of primary school age the same opportunity to access knowledge as the most privileged children in New York, Berlin or Tokyo. The One Laptop per Child program is the right vehicle to reach that goal and its potential socio-economic impact cannot be under-emphasized."

"We are very pleased that Colombia has committed to working with us to in order to bring a modern education to their primary school children," said Nicholas Negroponte, founder and chairman of One Laptop per Child. "OLPC is now gaining good traction in signing up countries to undertake significant deployments."

The first wave of 15,000 units to be deployed later in 2008 will be in Caldas's smaller towns and rural areas. For the capital Manizales, a separate agreement is being discussed so that total coverage of the State is achieved. Governor Aristizabal is spearheading a local team that will provide support and implementation capabilities to ensure the long-term sustainability of the project. The remaining 50,000 units will be deployed in 2008 and 2009.

When asked about the possibility of tactile feedback for the keyless device, the spokesperson revealed that the company was "working on it." The second generation of the child-oriented budget laptop, announced last week, is more ambitious than the first, claiming full multi-touch capability and a price target of $75. The OLPC XO-2 release date is projected to be no earlier than 2010, but its design direction offers look into possibilities for near-future display tech. [Laptop]

Interestingly, in this clip from Laptop Mag, Negroponte says that part of the reason they're unveiling the design so early is that they're hoping people will copy it—a radically different stance from the first time around, when riffs on the concept of a cheap subnotebook by competitors basically slew the original XO. Good to see a more enlightened view. In other OLPC news, Give 1, Get 1 will start back up in August or September. Man, I want one of these, and I'm not even in a Third World country. Or Alabama.

Cambridge, Mass., May 20, 2008 - One Laptop per Child (OLPC), a non-profit organization focused on providing educational tools to help children in developing countries "learn learning," announced today that work is already underway on a second-generation version of its revolutionary XO laptop computer. Leveraging new advances in technology, the primary goal of the "XO-2" will be to advance new concepts of learning as well as to further drive down the cost of the laptop so that it is affordable for volume purchase by developing nations.

"Based on feedback from governments, educators and most important, from the children themselves, we are aggressively working to lower the cost, power and size of the XO laptop so that it is more affordable and useable by the world's poorest children," said Nicholas Negroponte, founder and chairman of One Laptop per Child. "The delivery of the first generation XO laptop has sparked tremendous global interest in the project and provided valuable input on how to make the XO laptop an even better learning tool moving forward."

"One Laptop per Child and the XO laptop are crucial to the fulfillment of the proposed UN Ninth Millennium Goal: to ensure that every child between the ages of 6 and 12 has immediate access to a personal laptop computer by 2015, said, Nirj Deva, Member of the European Parliament. "It's only through access to education that young people will be able to develop the skills necessary to compete globally and to develop the solutions required to break the cycles of poverty, disease and malnutrition. Learning unites the child with the world, binds the village into a community, and joins that community to the global village."

The first generation XO laptop went into production in early November 2007, and there are approximately 600,000 units in deployment in a number of countries including Peru, Uruguay, Mongolia, Haiti, Rwanda, Mexico, Cambodia, Ethiopia, Ghana, Iraq, Afghanistan, and the US and Canada (as a result of the Give One Get One charitable giving campaign that ran last November 12 - December 31, 2007). Key goals for the XO-2 include:

Cost Reduction - Set in early 2005, the original target price of the XO laptop was $100. Although that target has not yet been met (it is now at $188), it is clear that OLPC must aim for an even lower target price of $75. New developments in display, processor and other hardware and software technologies will make it possible to achieve the $75 target in the future.

Lower Power Consumption - While the first generation XO laptop already requires just one-tenth (2-4 watts versus 20-40 watts) of the electrical power necessary to run a standard laptop, the XO-2 will reduce power consumption even further to 1 watt. This is particularly important for children in remote and rural environments where electricity is scarce or non-existent. Lowering the power consumption will reduce the amount of time required for children to generate power themselves via a hand crank or other manual mechanisms.

Smaller Footprint - The XO-2 laptop will be about half the size of the first generation device and will approximate the size of a book. The new design will make the XO laptop lighter and easier for children to carry with them to and from school or wherever they go. The XO-2 will continue to be in a green and white case and sport the XO logo in a multitude of colors that allow children to personalize the laptop as their own possession.

Enhanced Book Experience - Dual-touch sensitive displays will be used to enhance the e-book experience, with a dual-mode display similar to the current XO laptop. The design provides a right and left page in vertical format, a hinged laptop in horizontal format, and a flat two-screen wide continuous surface that can be used in tablet mode. Younger children will be able to use simple keyboards to get going, and older children will be able to switch between keyboards customized for applications as well as for multiple languages. The dual-touch display is being designed by Pixel Qi, which was founded in early 2008 by Mary Lou Jepsen, former chief technology officer of One Laptop per Children and a leading expert on display technology.

The price increase for the OLPC loaded with XP will be about $3 on top of the $200 price tag. Users who want a dual boot version to the OLPC will pay $7 extra. The XP operating system will come preloaded on an additional 2GB flash chip, offering 3GB of storage space total (1.5 usable after OS install).

After months of opposition by Bill Gates, talks of the joint venture began at CES 2008, where both men were attending. Widespread distribution of the machines is expected to happen in August or September. Check out the video demo below. [Microsoft and NY Times]

In order to be eligible for the price cut, tech firms need to be making low-cost PCs that limit their screen sizes to 10.2 inches and hard drives to 80GB and under. The computers must also not have more than 1GB RAM or a 1.0 GHz single-core processor, and come without touch-screen technology. These limitations help ensure that the ultra cheap laptops won't eat into the market for mainstream PCs running Windows Vista.

Microsoft will charge $26 for XP in emerging markets such as China and India, and $32 for developed markets like the United States. What do you guys think—will the price cut destroy the inroads Linux has been making into the consumer market? [ ComputerworldUK]

With Windows XP already available for the XO on an SD card, the news that future OLPC machines may have Windows XP, with Sugar running on top, may dismay the non-profit brigade. But with no support for the latest versions of Flash—a staple on many educational websites—the XO may not be catering to its supposed target audience.

If Windows XP does become the XO's operating system, then a substantial reworking of the laptop will be in order. Currently just 1GB of internal memory is available, and XP needs around 1.1GB. Sticking a larger SSD inside the machine will just pump up the price, making the XO even further out of reach of those who need it. [ComputerWorld]

Replacement is not the right word. We have no CEO. I have never held that title nor used it. I will continue to do what I do, no real change.

And in other news, the Windows version of the XO laptop should be released in less than 60 days, depending on how talks with Microsoft and OLPC go. [Laptop Mag]

Unlike the OLPC, which for $400 buys one for yourself and one for some kid in an underdeveloped country, for every 100 Elonex cheapies sold, the company will donate one.

This space is getting crowded. Looking at the Elonex website and noticing a lack of strong products, I'm curious if they're even developing this machine themselves. Asus made the EEE, OLPC has tons of innovation, and no doubt Intel put a bit of engineering muscle behind Classroom. I believe the intentions are well placed here, but you can't help but notice the PR lift a move like this brings. [Elonex via ZDUK]

It's about as powerful as the first Pentium M chips (Banias), but while those idled at 5W and averaged 24.5W, this little guy sips as little as 0.1W in its idle state, with peaks up to just 2W on the 2GHz model. It's really cheap to pump out too, tapped for the $200 OLPC at one point.

It comes in a couple different flavors up to that 2GHz version. To get athletic performance—it's a full-fledged x86 chip, not a half-baked cutdown—out of an anorexic processor, Intel worked all kinds of design mojo, like a new quick-wake deep sleep state. It's still a bit too hungry for smartphones, though. So, while it's a neat piece of silicon, as Ars says, it's still got a ways to go, especfially with stiff competition from ARM and TI. But that's a good thing.

So, even if they miraculously have one to send to you, it's late 'cause they don't know where to send it. It's telling that while they tout that 80,000 people donated to Give One, Get One, OLPC won't say how many people have actually gotten them yet. I think it's time to hand the org's reins over to some cigar-smoking monkeys in fedora hats. That way, even if everything was all screwy, it'd just be hilarious instead of you know, sad. [PC World]

Negroponte hopes that this will increase the sphere of influence of the OLPC, whilst simultaneously giving the project a wider global presence and creating a larger development community. Though Negroponte did not initially plan to include the US in the OLPC project, he admitted that not including the home country in the plans indefinitely would have been "kind of ridiculous." There are no dates given for nationwide release, but expect further details to drop soon. [PC World]

Okay, we remember how far OLPC spiraled way past its $100 laptop goal. So how can XO's designer—who should know as well as anyone the difficulties involved in cranking out uber-cheap machines—except to slash 25 percent off a price OLPC couldn't touch?

Because Pixel Qi stands to make beaucoup bucks from licensing tech to commercial companies, subsidizing its low-cost laptop, a far more effective business model than hoping wishy-washy governments maintain their closed-door promises to buy your wares while getting courted by your frenemy at the same time. (More on this at Valleywag.)

While Pixel Qi might provide components to OLPC "at cost," if it really puts a laptop on the marketplace that costs almost a third of XO's current price, XO is probably donezo. [Yahoo!]

OLPC prez Walter Bender said that Intel's efforts to build an XO Laptop with one of its chips were "seemingly half-hearted" and that its brass was more interested in OLPC for PR reasons:

"The only thing they were interested in was ... helping them make marketing statements about how Intel's approach to learning was different from OLPC's approach to learning," Bender said. "They weren't interested in how we can learn together and make something better for kids."

On the other hand, the market being flooded with ton of cheap laptops (which might be better than XO) for developing countries ultimately goes toward OLPC's goal to bring computers to everyone, so it's a bit off to say it is the One True Way, even if Intel really is a child-hating, PR-feeding douche. That said, we hope OLPC gets its act together soon. The only thing worse than a train wreck is one carrying the hopes and dreams of millions of children. Or something like that. [CW]