OLPC’s $100 laptop was going to save the world. Where is it now?
It was supposed to be the laptop that saved the world.
In late 2005, tech visionary and MIT Media Lab founder Nicholas Negroponte pulled the cloth cover off a small green computer with a bright yellow crank. The device was the first working prototype for Negroponte’s new nonprofit One Laptop Per Child, dubbed “the green machine” or simply “the $100 laptop.” And it was like nothing that Negroponte’s audience — at either his panel at a UN-sponsored tech summit in Tunis, or around the globe — had ever seen.
Source: OLPC’s $100 laptop was going to change the world — then it all went wrong – The Verge
I remember being so excited for the OLPC, and what I imagined could happen once the lack of access barrier was torn down. Unfortunately, this was not to come to pass in the United States. As the article states, the netbook phenomenon took some of the wind out of the OLPC sales, and now Chromebooks have removed the rest (at least in the USA).
