6 ms·

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 tha

by berg01 8y ago

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.

whitepoplar 8y ago
Any chance you could comment further on this? What in particular made it bad?
- drcode 8y ago
  The little I played with it, I remember lots of random UI stuff built by different teams put together haphazardly, and a button press would sometimes take seconds to show a result on the screen... basically what you'd expect from an alpha product put together by volunteers on a shoestring budget.
  - burfog 8y ago
    I think the problem started out the other way, with way too much budget. They bit off more than they could chew. The budget cuts happened later. If you had volunteers on a shoestring budget, you'd simply create a FVWM theme. It would be pretty normal, but with thick borders to compensate for the crude touchpad. You'd patch the program launcher to prevent running more than one thing at a time, thus dealing with the memory constraint and user confusion. That's it. Ship it. Instead, they wrote a completely experimental desktop environment in an interpreted language. This is not the sort of project you'd bite off with volunteers on a shoestring budget. I was a volunteer. I told them that stuff was nuts, but the paid staff were on a mission. Nothing could dissuade them. They wouldn't even dogfood. By that, I mean they didn't actually use the laptops. They used high-end developer workstations because the laptops were unusable. That should have been a hint.
    - nerpderp83 8y ago
      How selfish and arrogant. They should have been using the system and testing the system with end users as often as possible with the goal of shipping a totally functional 1.0 by a fixed date. Look at the totally baked systems with long lifetimes (C64, 512k Mac, Apple 2e) in the education space. OLPC was too ambitious with not enough clarity.
- maxsilver 8y ago
  I'm not the parent, but I bought two OLPCs back in the day in the "Give One, Get One" program. The software + hardware was really poor, even for the time. (Even the original Raspberry Pi is significantly faster -- I know this isn't a fair comparison, but just for reference) Also a lot of the OLPC functionality didn't work reliably, or didn't work at all. I bought it specifically for the mesh networking, which was cut entirely. The devices did work over WiFi, but would struggle to see other OLPCs over wifi reliably, even when connected to the same AP. I spent a lot of time reading forums online to troubleshoot and download fixed drivers and such. I remember explicitly wondering "how are children in poor areas who depend on mesh networked internet, supposed to be figuring all of this out?". The screen was hard to use. The e-Paper mode was nice, but the regular mode was blurry/grainy and slow and dim and just difficult to see. In terms of Software + UI + responsiveness, it felt more like a really big Palm Pilot, and less like a laptop. --- I loved the mission, I loved the ideas, I loved the design. The exterior of the case really was durable and kid-friendly. I loved the idea of the screen. I threw them more money than was reasonable. I was just fairly underwhelmed by the device as it actually shipped. It felt like a prototype of a dev kit, which is fine. But it was sold as something for children to use, and at least at the time I messed with them, it was nowhere near ready for that.
  - krupan 8y ago
    Your review is probably much more honest than mine... The potential was awesome. I forgot about all the promises that were never fulfilled. Remember when they promised that the super wide touchpad would be resistive touch and you would be able to use a stylus and write on it? Would have been cool, but I don't think that ever happened either.
    - maxsilver 8y ago
      Oh yeah, I remember that too. That one always felt to me like something they couldn't deliver on (just like the hand crank -- which admittedly, that one they did tell everyone would be dropped before they ordered). But I remember being most disappointed about the mesh networking, since that was supposed to be the thing that made the project feasible. I intentionally bought two of these devices just so they could talk to each other -- and they couldn't reliably do so, even with conventional WiFi at their disposal).
- switchbak 8y ago
  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.
  - floren 8y ago
    > 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.
    - avhon1 8y ago
      > 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/ https://bitbucket.org/inferno-os/inferno-os/ [1] http://gsoc.cat-v.org/people/ameya/blog/2007/08/19/1_Plan9_Kernel_Booting_on_OLPC/ http://gsoc.cat-v.org/people/ameya/blog/2007/08/19/1_Plan9_K...
  - bitwize 8y ago
    Sugar wasn't just written in Python. Parts of it were literally coded in the worst way possible. We're talking Daily WTF levels. For example, the icon for each Sugar "activity" was an SVG file. When you started an activity, its icon would "throb" in the center of the screen, fading in and out. Guess how the throbbing was implemented. That's right, it would perform string substitution on the SVG file, filling in the actual colors for macros embedded in the SVG, then reparse and redisplay the SVG. For each frame. Had it been a simple matter of being written in Python, Sugar might've been usable. But it was shitty Python and that's what killed it.
    - 8y ago
- avhon1 8y ago
  The software for the initial public release of the OLPC was very rushed. The organization received so many small orders that they took people off of software development in order to process orders. These laptops were shipped (often months late) with beta-quality software. Beta-quality software was a terrible experience on a 400MHz machine with 0.25GB of memory -- there were no resources to spare. Subsequent OS releases fixed most of the software problems, but the project had lost a lot of steam and goodwill by then. (They also lost a lot of goodwill before the release when Microsoft announced that they'd gotten Windows XP to work on the laptop, and the OLPC project announced that it would be available as an alternative to their own linux-based OS. [0]) As a result of the really, really bad experience with the Give 1 Get 1 campaign, OLPC instituted minimum order quantities of 1000 laptops (or 100 laptops if you ask nicely. The OLPC XO-1.5, a new motherboard for the XO-1 laptop, was also available in minimum quantity 100). The latest version of the laptop, the XO-4, has a gigahertz ARM processor and either 1 or 2 GB of memory. However, there are only 3 ways to get one: * be in a country or school program that purchased the XO-4 * have a quarter-million dollars to spend on 100 laptops * convince the OLPC project to give you one so you can develop educational software for it [1] If you buy (or hear someone talk about buying) an OLPC laptop, it's almost guaranteed to be an XO-1. Unfortunately, most of the software (including the OS) is now developed against the much more powerful XO-4. This means that the XO-1 is now in a similar state now as it was when it was released -- almost everything is slow, and your precious RAM fills up quickly. Exemplifying the state of the XO-1 laptop is a memory leak [2] in Sugar (the desktop UI). On the 1-2GB XO-4, it is not considered a problem: > The leak has negligible impact on XO-4, XO-1.75 and XO-1.5. On these laptops we recommend that you restart Sugar at least weekly. In the XO-1, however, idle memory consumption is easily 150 MB, and you can run out of memory in less than one day. The official fix is: > On the XO-1 we recommend that you restart Sugar every few hours I feel bad about the whole situation. The OLPC organization seriously tried to make Alan Kay's Dynabook real, and they produced a really cool piece, well-designed piece of hardware. (Not to mention a very well-documented hardware-software pair. [3][4]) It's a shame that they got in way over their heads by trying to develop the hardware, develop drivers for the hardware, develop a custom desktop environment, develop child-friendly userspace applications, and sell them in single quantity, defend themselves from critics, and also attract sales contracts from foreign bureaucracies. [0] https://tech.slashdot.org/story/08/05/15/2320243/microsoft-and-olpc-agree-to-put-xp-on-the-xo-laptop https://tech.slashdot.org/story/08/05/15/2320243/microsoft-a... [1] http://wiki.laptop.org/go/Developers_Program http://wiki.laptop.org/go/Developers_Program [2] http://wiki.laptop.org/go/Release_notes/13.2.9#Sugar_Memory_Leak http://wiki.laptop.org/go/Release_notes/13.2.9#Sugar_Memory_... [3] http://wiki.laptop.org/go/XO-1/Software_specification http://wiki.laptop.org/go/XO-1/Software_specification [4] http://wiki.laptop.org/go/Hardware_specifications http://wiki.laptop.org/go/Hardware_specifications

by berg01 8y ago

whitepoplar 8y ago

Any chance you could comment further on this? What in particular made it bad?

drcode 8y ago
The little I played with it, I remember lots of random UI stuff built by different teams put together haphazardly, and a button press would sometimes take seconds to show a result on the screen... basically what you'd expect from an alpha product put together by volunteers on a shoestring budget.
- burfog 8y ago
  I think the problem started out the other way, with way too much budget. They bit off more than they could chew. The budget cuts happened later. If you had volunteers on a shoestring budget, you'd simply create a FVWM theme. It would be pretty normal, but with thick borders to compensate for the crude touchpad. You'd patch the program launcher to prevent running more than one thing at a time, thus dealing with the memory constraint and user confusion. That's it. Ship it. Instead, they wrote a completely experimental desktop environment in an interpreted language. This is not the sort of project you'd bite off with volunteers on a shoestring budget. I was a volunteer. I told them that stuff was nuts, but the paid staff were on a mission. Nothing could dissuade them. They wouldn't even dogfood. By that, I mean they didn't actually use the laptops. They used high-end developer workstations because the laptops were unusable. That should have been a hint.
  - nerpderp83 8y ago
    How selfish and arrogant. They should have been using the system and testing the system with end users as often as possible with the goal of shipping a totally functional 1.0 by a fixed date. Look at the totally baked systems with long lifetimes (C64, 512k Mac, Apple 2e) in the education space. OLPC was too ambitious with not enough clarity.
maxsilver 8y ago
I'm not the parent, but I bought two OLPCs back in the day in the "Give One, Get One" program. The software + hardware was really poor, even for the time. (Even the original Raspberry Pi is significantly faster -- I know this isn't a fair comparison, but just for reference) Also a lot of the OLPC functionality didn't work reliably, or didn't work at all. I bought it specifically for the mesh networking, which was cut entirely. The devices did work over WiFi, but would struggle to see other OLPCs over wifi reliably, even when connected to the same AP. I spent a lot of time reading forums online to troubleshoot and download fixed drivers and such. I remember explicitly wondering "how are children in poor areas who depend on mesh networked internet, supposed to be figuring all of this out?". The screen was hard to use. The e-Paper mode was nice, but the regular mode was blurry/grainy and slow and dim and just difficult to see. In terms of Software + UI + responsiveness, it felt more like a really big Palm Pilot, and less like a laptop. --- I loved the mission, I loved the ideas, I loved the design. The exterior of the case really was durable and kid-friendly. I loved the idea of the screen. I threw them more money than was reasonable. I was just fairly underwhelmed by the device as it actually shipped. It felt like a prototype of a dev kit, which is fine. But it was sold as something for children to use, and at least at the time I messed with them, it was nowhere near ready for that.
- krupan 8y ago
  Your review is probably much more honest than mine... The potential was awesome. I forgot about all the promises that were never fulfilled. Remember when they promised that the super wide touchpad would be resistive touch and you would be able to use a stylus and write on it? Would have been cool, but I don't think that ever happened either.
  - maxsilver 8y ago
    Oh yeah, I remember that too. That one always felt to me like something they couldn't deliver on (just like the hand crank -- which admittedly, that one they did tell everyone would be dropped before they ordered). But I remember being most disappointed about the mesh networking, since that was supposed to be the thing that made the project feasible. I intentionally bought two of these devices just so they could talk to each other -- and they couldn't reliably do so, even with conventional WiFi at their disposal).
switchbak 8y ago
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.
- floren 8y ago
  > 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.
  - avhon1 8y ago
    > 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/ https://bitbucket.org/inferno-os/inferno-os/ [1] http://gsoc.cat-v.org/people/ameya/blog/2007/08/19/1_Plan9_Kernel_Booting_on_OLPC/ http://gsoc.cat-v.org/people/ameya/blog/2007/08/19/1_Plan9_K...
- bitwize 8y ago
  Sugar wasn't just written in Python. Parts of it were literally coded in the worst way possible. We're talking Daily WTF levels. For example, the icon for each Sugar "activity" was an SVG file. When you started an activity, its icon would "throb" in the center of the screen, fading in and out. Guess how the throbbing was implemented. That's right, it would perform string substitution on the SVG file, filling in the actual colors for macros embedded in the SVG, then reparse and redisplay the SVG. For each frame. Had it been a simple matter of being written in Python, Sugar might've been usable. But it was shitty Python and that's what killed it.
  - 8y ago
avhon1 8y ago
The software for the initial public release of the OLPC was very rushed. The organization received so many small orders that they took people off of software development in order to process orders. These laptops were shipped (often months late) with beta-quality software. Beta-quality software was a terrible experience on a 400MHz machine with 0.25GB of memory -- there were no resources to spare. Subsequent OS releases fixed most of the software problems, but the project had lost a lot of steam and goodwill by then. (They also lost a lot of goodwill before the release when Microsoft announced that they'd gotten Windows XP to work on the laptop, and the OLPC project announced that it would be available as an alternative to their own linux-based OS. [0]) As a result of the really, really bad experience with the Give 1 Get 1 campaign, OLPC instituted minimum order quantities of 1000 laptops (or 100 laptops if you ask nicely. The OLPC XO-1.5, a new motherboard for the XO-1 laptop, was also available in minimum quantity 100). The latest version of the laptop, the XO-4, has a gigahertz ARM processor and either 1 or 2 GB of memory. However, there are only 3 ways to get one: * be in a country or school program that purchased the XO-4 * have a quarter-million dollars to spend on 100 laptops * convince the OLPC project to give you one so you can develop educational software for it [1] If you buy (or hear someone talk about buying) an OLPC laptop, it's almost guaranteed to be an XO-1. Unfortunately, most of the software (including the OS) is now developed against the much more powerful XO-4. This means that the XO-1 is now in a similar state now as it was when it was released -- almost everything is slow, and your precious RAM fills up quickly. Exemplifying the state of the XO-1 laptop is a memory leak [2] in Sugar (the desktop UI). On the 1-2GB XO-4, it is not considered a problem: > The leak has negligible impact on XO-4, XO-1.75 and XO-1.5. On these laptops we recommend that you restart Sugar at least weekly. In the XO-1, however, idle memory consumption is easily 150 MB, and you can run out of memory in less than one day. The official fix is: > On the XO-1 we recommend that you restart Sugar every few hours I feel bad about the whole situation. The OLPC organization seriously tried to make Alan Kay's Dynabook real, and they produced a really cool piece, well-designed piece of hardware. (Not to mention a very well-documented hardware-software pair. [3][4]) It's a shame that they got in way over their heads by trying to develop the hardware, develop drivers for the hardware, develop a custom desktop environment, develop child-friendly userspace applications, and sell them in single quantity, defend themselves from critics, and also attract sales contracts from foreign bureaucracies. [0] https://tech.slashdot.org/story/08/05/15/2320243/microsoft-and-olpc-agree-to-put-xp-on-the-xo-laptop https://tech.slashdot.org/story/08/05/15/2320243/microsoft-a... [1] http://wiki.laptop.org/go/Developers_Program http://wiki.laptop.org/go/Developers_Program [2] http://wiki.laptop.org/go/Release_notes/13.2.9#Sugar_Memory_Leak http://wiki.laptop.org/go/Release_notes/13.2.9#Sugar_Memory_... [3] http://wiki.laptop.org/go/XO-1/Software_specification http://wiki.laptop.org/go/XO-1/Software_specification [4] http://wiki.laptop.org/go/Hardware_specifications http://wiki.laptop.org/go/Hardware_specifications