On One Laptop per Child

Re:On One Laptop per Child by TomOfTTB on Tuesday July 28, 2009 @10:17AM (#727934)

I'm sorry but this is just BS. Other than "they're both small" name me all the similarities between the Eee PC and the OLPC. How did a computer sold to kids in third world countries inspire a bunch of middle class Americans to buy netbooks. More over for your theory to be true you have to ignore the constant attempts companies have been making at what is now the netbook market. Everything from the Newton to Microsoft's Handheld PC.

Netbooks are flourshing now because technology has gotten to the point where you can fit a full OS on them. It has nothing to do with the OLPC

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Re:On One Laptop per Child by jcl on Tuesday July 28, 2009 @11:14AM (#728044)

From a Forbes article on Jonney Shih, CEO of Asus:

But around that time, two low-cost notebook models were making waves. Last November tech guru Nicholas Negroponte's One Laptop Per Child, or OLPC, program released its first batch of prototype laptops designed for children in the developing world. And Intel was getting ready to launch a competing laptop, the Classmate PC, for a similar market. So, Shih thought, why not make a small, inexpensive laptop for grown-ups?

http://members.forbes.com/global/2007/1112/024a.html

For years prior to the OLPC, we had been able to make a small laptop with a full OS... The OLPC's AMD Geode CPU was seven years old at the time they chose to use it. What none of the manufacturers realized was that there was any sort of market for a vastly underpowered, almost unusably cramped, extremely cheap laptop that attempts to run a full OS. The media buzz created by the OLPC revealed this market.

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