I have three children and they all have a OLPC laptop. They are designed for children 6-15 it is easy to forget how physically small people in this age group can be. I think a larger screen would make it more difficult to carry and would result in more broken (dropped) laptops.

The $100 price and and the effect on battery usage are the limiting factors. These things have to be rechargeable with cheap solar arrays and/or a hand crank.

You make do with what you have :).... However, instead of teaching word processing and such (office s/w)... how about teaching kids that it's just a machine and you can make it do your bidding..

I remember starting with GW BASIC when I was 10 or so and the first 'graphic' program was an analog clock on a 80x40 CRT console, felt like I could build anything with it..

The authors agree! Sugar (the environment of these laptops) comes with an easy-to-learn multimedia programming environment (Scratch), a simple Python IDE (Pippy), a graphical editor for acustic and electric circuits (TamTam SynthLab) and an authoring tool with programmable behaviours (EToys).

http://laptop.org/en/laptop/software/activities.shtml

I got my start with Logo (which I think is a direct ancestor of Scratch) from MIT

Those are OLPC "laptops", very cheap hardware and open source software (Sugar interface). They have a large resolution, and I think are resistive touch screens as well. Is it as productive as a full-blown MBP? Of course not. But when I was a kid, we didn't have portable computers like these at all. We didn't even have cellphones. I had a Super Mario Watch with Tetris on it. That was mindblowing. And "nerdy". And small. And awkward to use while on wrist.

I learned to program on a 48K Apple II clone with a 40x24 text display (and 192x280 graphics). The important point is the UI is dictated by the physical device. We are used to multiple humongous monitors now, but we are not restricted to that. 900x1200 is more than my first Sun SPARCStation...

It's amazing how little space you need when banner ads, pop-overs, Amazon/Ask Jeeves/Yahoo/RealPlayer/Norton/McAfee/Bing toolbars, and an oversized mobile-inspired UI aren't in the way.

XO-1 uses a 7.5" 1200x900 display. That's about the size of a small-ish tablet (e.g. the iPad Mini has a 7.9" screen) or the "old" netbooks (EEEPC 700 had a 7" display).

Adults can work fine with that, and the XO-1 is targeted towards late kids and young teens.

In the developing country of 1979 we did quite a bit with a lot less ...

I remember my dad's first company computer. It had a smaller screen with green text on black background. The screen was integrated into this desktop computer to make it somewhat portable I guess.

When develop country start computing the screen were not that big either[0].

Its the beginning, soon enough we all will get those 4k-160hz-retina_display screens. :]

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Computer_monitor#/media/File:2...

I'm assuming you don't have a smartphone then...