Gave One Got One

I am writing this from my newly arrived One Laptop Per Child XO laptop.

Why did I get one? Its a part of history. Its a great program that strives to break poverty by the old saying "Give a man a fish he eats for a day. Teach a man to fish he eats for a lifetime". It represents a whole new direction for computing, that represents a whole lot more than this little laptop. It is an educational appliance.

The OLPC reminds me very much of my first computer, an Atari 800. An affordable all in one box that used a TV as a monitor, it ran one program at a time, and came with a BASIC languge cartridge so you could write your own.

The OLPC's interface is organized into activities. You work in one activity at a time, each taking up the whole screen, although multiple activities can be running at once. A simple home screen lets you choose activities. The activities you run and what your work in them are logged in a journal. An other screen lets you find networks and other OLPCs to share your work with.

That's it. There is no desktop, no file manager, control panel, start menu, or overlapping windows. Nothing to complicate or take away from the running activity. It is the simplicity of those first home computers reborn.

In this way the OLPC does more with less, and makes the creativity and discovery that technology can provide available to whole new groups of people in new places and ways. The hardware is simple and novel, but the specs are equivalent to what was state of the art maybe seven years ago.

For me, having a small computer that weighs just a couple pounds and is so simple is wonderful. I can browse, type, code, most anywhere. It fits in a sweet spot between the iPhone and a traditional laptop. That's a big gap not much else fills well, and may prove to be a new sweet spot for "computers for the rest of us".