OLPC XO

The OLPC XO (formerly known as $100 Laptop, Children's Machine, 2B1) is a low cost laptop computer intended to be distributed to children in developing countries around the world, to provide them with access to knowledge, and opportunities to "explore, experiment and express themselves" (constructionist learning). The XO was developed by Nicholas Negroponte, a co-founder of MIT's Media Lab, and designed by Yves Behar's Fuseproject company. The laptop is manufactured by Quanta Computer and developed by One Laptop per Child (OLPC), a non-profit 501(c)(3) organization. The subnotebooks were designed for sale to government-education systems which then would give each primary school child their own laptop. Pricing was set to start at US$188 in 2006, with a stated goal to reach the $100 mark in 2008 and the 50-dollar mark by 2010. When offered for sale in the Give One Get One campaigns of Q4 2006 and Q4 2007, the laptop was sold at$199. The rugged, low-power computers use flash memory instead of a hard disk drive (HDD), and come with a pre-installed operating system derived from Fedora Linux, with the Sugar graphical user interface (GUI). Mobile ad hoc networking via 802.11s Wi-Fi mesh networking, to allow many machines to share Internet access as long as at least one of them could connect to an access point, was initially announced, but quickly abandoned after proving unreliable. The latest version of the OLPC XO is the XO-4 Touch, introduced in 2012. One Laptop per Child The first early prototype was unveiled by the project's founder Nicholas Negroponte and then-United Nations Secretary-General Kofi Annan on November 16, 2005, at the World Summit on the Information Society (WSIS) in Tunis, Tunisia. The device shown was a rough prototype using a standard development board. Negroponte estimated that the screen alone required three more months of development. The first working prototype was demonstrated at the project's Country Task Force Meeting on May 23, 2006.