By all accounts they were not really useful, broke easily, and couldn't be repaired in the field. Many countries backed out of their commitment once they tried out their samples. Those which took delivery ended up not integrating them into curriculum because they didn't deliver on their promise.

It did kickstart the "netbook" form factor, which ended up replacing most OLPC use cases. So not a total failure from a technology standpoint, like Juicero and Theranos were. But it is a bit of a poster child for everything that's wrong with the MIT Media Lab.

https://www.theverge.com/2018/4/16/17233946/olpcs-100-laptop...

It didn't kickstart netbooks, which predate OLPC XO by a decade and were far less experimental designs.

There were older subnotebooks of various kinds but "netbooks" by that name are usually associated with small Atom-based machines that Intel was pushing partly in response to OLPC hype. See, e.g., this article from 2009. https://web.archive.org/web/20110130085835/http://blogs.comp...

Netbooks are usually considered to have started in 2007 with the OLPC and eeepc: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Netbook