XO-1 (laptop)

The idea of ​​the notebook is based on the constructivist theory of learning created by Seymour Papert ( born Constructionist Learning ), later developed by Alan Kay and Mitchel Resnick , the principles of which are outlined in the book by Nicholas Negroponte Being Digital ( ISBN 0- 679-43919-6 ).

Google , News Corp , AMD , Red Hat , BrightStar and Nortel Networks gave two million dollars for the project. All of them - both people and organizations - are active participants in the project.

In many ways, this project is a descendant of eMate 1997 (based on Apple Newton ), also intended for education.

The current prototype device was presented on November 16, 2005 in the second part of the World Summit of the Information Society ( WSIS ) in Tunisia . The presented device was an incomplete prototype, and work to improve its performance and prices are still ongoing. Negroponte assumes that screen improvement work alone will take three months. It is planned that the device will be available in late 2006 - early 2007 . ^[2]

In Russia, the laptop was used in the summer school "Digital Ecology-2008" in the Nizhny Novgorod region and in several secondary schools ^[3] .

Argentina , Brazil , Egypt , USA ( Massachusetts and Maine ), Cambodia , Dominican Republic , Costa Rica , Tunisia , Pakistan and Venezuela joined the project in various ways. A presentation of the “One Laptop per Child” took place in Kyrgyzstan ^[4] .

Massachusetts Governor Mitt Romney presented to the state legislature a notebook distribution bill for all state children.

Thailand after the coup d'état refused to participate in the program.

India also refused to participate.

In Russia , XO-1 laptops began to be used to equip children's environmental camps. The pilot project is the summer camp Digital Ecology 2008 , conducted under the guidance of the staff of the Nizhny Novgorod Pedagogical University . ^[five]

Initially it was thought that OLPC should be distributed only through the government, but Negroponte said that they could work with well-known manufacturers to create a commercial version of about $ 225, which would compensate for the cost of laptops for developing countries.

On December 13, 2005, the OLPC board of directors announced that Quanta Computers was selected as the original equipment manufacturer ( ODM . This decision was made after the proposals of several manufacturers were considered. The company stressed the need to do the job: “We still need to do a lot of research and development, and we hope to get the final product in the second half of next year ( 2006 ),” referring to Quanta. Over the next six months, the Quanta Research Institute research team should be working on a laptop. ^[6]

The laptop is designed to be inexpensive, small, reliable and economical. It uses a lightweight version of the Fedora operating system and a Sugar graphical shell designed for it that allows children to interact with each other.

It is equipped with a video camera , microphone , Wi-Fi wireless network, as well as an input device that combines the capabilities of the touchpad and pen input. For charging, a number of devices and concepts have been developed that use alternative energy sources, including solar, wind, mechanical, and muscular power, so that the device can be used regardless of the availability and availability of the mains. ^[7]

Device Requirements

Mary Lowe Jepsen ( eng. Mary Lou Jepsen ) defined the hardware requirements as follows: ^{[8] [9]}

• minimum power consumption, which should be in the range of 2-3 W ;
• in the production of more than a million copies of the maximum cost of production should be $ 100;
• attractive and even "cool" appearance;
• e-book functionality with minimal power consumption;
• The software that comes with the laptop should be open and free.

Hardware

Hardware specifications for December 2005 . ^{[10] [11] [12]}

Features

• AMD Geode LX-700 processor (433 MHz) with integrated video controller and 0.8 W power consumption;
• processor frequency 366 MHz
• 7.5 inch (19 cm) diagonal LCD SVGA display, which can be used in two modes:
  • Transmit color / DVD mode with 800 × 600 resolution with backlight (for use in laptop mode);
  • monochrome reflecting sunlight in the resolution of 1200 × 700 (for reading electronic books in the open air);
• 256 megabytes of DRAM memory;
• 1 megabyte of constant flash memory containing coreboot (previously LinuxBIOS );
• 1024 megabytes of flash memory;
• SD slot for connecting portable memory cards;
• webcam with a resolution of 640 × 480;
• a wireless network using the “Extended Range” IEEE 802.11b chipset operating at low speed (2 Mbps) to reduce power consumption;
• the ability to maintain the functioning of the network even in the case of a disabled processor, which is achieved by using a Marvell 8388 chip;
• localized keyboard with common layout keys;
• touch pad for handwriting;
• two speakers ;
• built-in microphone;
• audio system based on AC97 ;
• 2 external USB 2.0 ports ;
• power sources:
  • power cord, which can simultaneously be used to carry a laptop;
  • two rechargeable batteries of size C (R14) or D;
  • Four C (LR14) or D (LR20) alkaline batteries.

Configuration change

Since May 2009, XO-1 laptops are equipped with processors manufactured by VIA Technologies Inc. ^[13] . Now their configuration will look like this:

• VIA C7-M processor with a clock frequency of 1 GHz, which, if necessary, can be reduced to 400 MHz.
• Motherboard based on the VIA VX855 chipset, which supports an HD video decoder, an integrated video card, USB interfaces, HD audio, etc.
• RAM 1GB DDR2.
• Flash memory of 4 or 8GB.

Power consumption

According to the objectives of the project, power consumption should be 4 watts in laptop mode. Consumption in e-book mode should be in the range of 0.3—0.8 watts.

In the e-book mode, all subsystems “fall asleep”, with the exception of the display (the screen backlight also turns off). When the user moves to another page, the system “wakes up”, displays a new page and again goes to sleep.

Display

It is expected that OLPC laptops of the first generation will have modern low-cost liquid crystal TFT displays.

Probably later OLPC laptops will use low-cost and cost-effective high-resolution displays based on electronic ink .

TFT display is the most expensive part of a laptop. In April 2005, Negroponte hired Mary Lou Jepsen , who thought to join the Media Arts and Sciences MIT Media Lab in September 2006 as the technical director of OLPC. Jepsen is developing a new display for laptops of the first generation, which, as stated in the Laptop FAQ ^[10] , are based on small LCD screens used in portable DVD players. She believes that such a display will cost about $ 35.

Wireless Network

IEEE 802.11b support will be provided using the Wi-Fi “Extended Range” chipset. Jepsen said the wireless chipset would work at a reduced speed of 2 Mbps instead of the usual 5.5 or 11 Mbps in order to reduce power consumption.

Every time after switching on, the laptop connects to a common mesh network in which each node can connect to other nodes and can receive and transmit packets of nodes through the cloud . If any computer in the cloud accesses the Internet (directly or indirectly), all the computers on the network get access to the network. The speed of data transmission through such a network is small, but similar networks, such as “save and transfer” the Motoman project ^[14] , are now provided by e-mail to 1000 schoolchildren in Cambodia . Most likely, this speed is enough for such asynchronous network applications, such as mail, to communicate with those who are outside the cloud, and not for interactive use, web surfing or high-speed applications, such as video transmission. Interactive networking is possible inside the cloud.

Conventional IEEE 802.11 systems only manage traffic within a local cloud of wireless devices in much the same way as an Ethernet system. Each node receives and transmits packets directly, but does not forward packets between nodes of the network if they cannot communicate directly. What additional protocols will be used to form a mesh network is unclear.

It is also unclear whether the laptop will participate in the network, if it is in the mode of electronic books.

Keyboard and touchpad

Negroponte and Jepson said that the keyboard will be modified in order to fit the standard keyboard of the current country. Some versions of the prototype, shown in WSIS , had a removable keyboard. On other prototypes, the keyboard was connected to the display. It is unclear whether the detachable keyboard is part of the final design, and how in this case some ways of using the laptop, announced by Negroponte (“ accordion ” use of keys in the e-book mode) will be implemented.

Below the keyboard there is a large dark area, similar to a very wide touchpad , which Jepsen calls “mauspad”. Negroponte said that this device will be used for "calligraphy", possibly to support languages ​​that use ideograms . It is also understood that it will be possible to use both fingers and pens-like devices. This extended touchpad can also be used with “accordion-like” use in e-book mode to navigate to the next and previous pages. On the prototype, this device did not function.

Tightness

The keyboard rotates around the waterproof power compartment or generator, closing the display surrounded by a carrying handle. According to Negroponte, in the closed state, the keyboard and display are sealed and exclude the ingress of water and dust.

Software

All laptop software should be free . For November 2006, the use of the following software was planned:

• a stripped-down version of Fedora Core as an operating system . Students will have root access to their computer.
• web browser based on the Gecko engine . Also, a special version of the Opera browser is being completed ^[15]
• AbiWord word processor
• work with e-mail through the Gmail service
• chat and voip programs
• interpreters for Logo , JavaScript , Python , Csound
• Squeak programming system, including the Smalltalk programming language
• music sequencer TamTam ^[16]
• Software for viewing and editing video and sound: MPlayer , Helix

For the laptop, it is planned to use the Sugar graphical user interface (GUI) written in Python , which works on top of the X Window System . The interface will look unusual for a desktop , however, such things as the representation of program and document icons, a kind of network environment where computers on the local network are displayed as a map will be present there. All launched applications will work in full screen mode.

Steve Jobs offered to use Mac OS X for free in a laptop, but, referring to Seymour Pipert , Professor Emeritus at MIT and one of the project initiators, the developers want to work with the operating system, which they can repair if necessary. like this is not open source software . ” ^[17] Therefore, GNU / Linux was chosen.

Microsoft's Bill Gates tried to convince Negroponte to use one of the versions of Microsoft Windows , but his proposal was also not accepted. Some Negroponte friends said that Microsoft might try to port Windows to a laptop, to which he replied that this would be great and would have helped spread notebooks. ^[18]

Negroponte also stated that he would like to see Wikipedia on a laptop. Jimmy Wales , one of the co-founders of Wikipedia, feels that Wikipedia can be the killer app for this device. ^[19] A number of books need to be rewritten in order for the project to achieve its main educational objectives. On the other hand, publishers can release cheap electronic versions of their publications, and then they too could be used.

On August 4, 2006, the Wikimedia Foundation announced that a static ( offline ) collection of articles from Wikipedia will be delivered with a laptop.

March 8, 2007 at the Slashdot forum Don Hopkins , a programmer and main developer of the game SimCity , said that with the blessing of Will Wright and the company Electronic Arts he is porting SimCity to an OLPC laptop. In addition, he demonstrated SimCity running on a laptop at a computer games developer conference ( GDC ). ^[20]

On May 15, 2008, the OLPC Foundation announced that the OLPC XO-1 will ship with Windows XP from the end of summer. ^[21]

It is reported ^[22] about installing OpenOffice.org - ( OOo4Kids ) on the “children's version” laptop.

With the help of Design Continuum MIT Media Lab explored various uses, including: laptop, e-book, theater, modeling, transportation, as well as a notepad architecture.

In the early stages, the project was largely criticized as impracticable.

At a UN conference held in Tunisia at the end of 2005, some officials from Africa , the most famous of whom are Marthe Dansokho from Cameroon and Mohammed Diop from Mali , expressed doubts about the motives of the project and stated that the project was “too American”, and the proposed solution was not applicable to the specific tasks facing the people of Africa.

Dansoho said that the project has the wrong priorities: ^[23]

The women of Africa do most of the work and do not have time to sit with the children and think about what the harvest should be ... All they need is clean water and real schools.

Diop, in turn, said that this is an attempt to create new markets under the cover of "non-commercial" activities: ^{[23] [24]}

This is a very clever marketing move. Under the guise of "non-commercial" activities, hundreds of millions of these laptops will be sold to our governments. The only way to achieve economic goals is price reduction. They found a way to sell a huge number of devices to poor people.

The head of Microsoft, Bill Gates , said in early 2006 that making cheap laptops is not the optimal solution and, in his opinion, it is much simpler to develop cheap smartphones that have a connector for connecting a full keyboard and a TV, which will turn a mobile phone into a full- featured PC . ^[25]

• Give one get one
• en: Sugar (GUI)
• I-slate

• laptop.org - Official site.
• OLPC Wiki
• olpcnews.com - news
• Happiness to all children, almost for nothing 2005
• And let no one leave offended 2007
• UN decided to support the social project of Nicholas Negroponte 2006
• A one-hundred-dollar laptop will be supplemented with materials Wikipedia.org 2006
• Cheap laptop came to a third world child 2007
• Orders for laptops XO is becoming more and more (Neopr.) . Compulenta (December 4, 2007). The appeal date is August 17, 2009.
• One of the creators of the OLPC comes out of the project: “a hundred-dollar laptop” will become cheaper up to 75
• OLPC: XO-2 concept
• HOHO: Notebook 2.0 for $ 100 turned out to be incredibly advanced, membrana.ru
• Nortel to Sponsor “One Laptop per Child” Initiative; Sponsorship Helps Bringing Technology to Emerging Markets (not available from 04/09/2013 [2157 days] - history , copy ) Business Wire, December 14, 2005
• Jim gettys $ 100 Laptop / OLPC (One Laptop Per Child) December 16, 2005
• Russian officials will put a computer in every house
• Reiman will help Intel-Windows business