The Face of the $100 Laptop

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When BusinessWeek visited the OLPC offices in Cambridge, Mass., in mid-February, one of the XO designers had just achieved something of a milestone. He had loaded a game modeled on Tetris on a test machine and was trying it out. This scene took place in a large, brightly lit room where a handful of XO computers were scattered on tabletops, many with their miniature circuitry exposed—a reminder that Sugar is still very much a work in progress. "You're the first to see Tetris running on our computer," said Walter Bender, OLPC's president of software and content.

Neighborhood Approach

The game, called Block Party, is being used as a sample of how developers should create applications for XO. "We're showing them how to 'Sugarize' their applications," Bender explained. That means conceiving applications from the start as activities that take place on the network and are shared by groups of youngsters and their teachers.

"Sugarizing" also has a technical side: The software is built on top of Red Hat Linux, and is an open-source project itself, meaning that any interested software programmer could write software to run on the machine. But the programs must be small—the XO has no hard drive—so existing PC software must first be rewritten.

Sugar has a look and feel all its own. When you start up the machine, you see the image of the so-called "XO Man," an O on top of an X, placed in the middle of a circle. A darkened border frames the display, lined with icons representing activities such as e-mail, a simple word processor, a photography program (XO has a built-in camera), a Web browser, instant messenger, and an electronic book reader.

There are also icons representing the three different modes—home, friends, and neighborhood—that are integral to the "zoom" metaphor. In home mode, a user sees the XO Man, and, when she clicks on the icon to launch an activity, the icon for that activity pops into a gray ring encircling the XO Man. In friends mode, she sees icons representing her circle of friends, each identified by nickname and chosen color scheme. Next to the friends are icons depicting the activities in which they're engaged.

If several friends are sharing an activity—say, working on a school report together—they are pictured clustered around the appropriate icon. Our user can ask to be invited into a group activity or can start one of her own and invite others to join. The neighborhood mode gives a broader view of all of the individuals and clusters of friends on the network at the moment and the activities they're involved in.

Wi-Fi For the Village

One of the key technologies behind the XO computer is its so-called mesh network. Created by Mikhail Bletsas, the OLTP's chief connectivity officer, the XO mesh connects all of the XO computers in a village via a Wi-Fi network. If any one of the computers is connected to the Internet, they all get Net access. And the computer's antenna is always left on so the network remains active—though networking draws less than half a watt of power from the computer's battery. The children are expected to keep their computers powered by occasionally turning a hand crank or operating a yo-yo type device that keeps the battery juiced up.

From the start of the Sugar project last summer, Bender urged his small team of programmers to keep the interface simple and to organize things so children could learn by doing. Even now, the Sugar development team is made up of just eight full- and part-time contributors. Several of them, including Blizzard, work for Red Hat Software, the leading distributor of the Linux open-source PC operating system. One of them, lead designer Marco Gritti, an Italian, gave sugar its name.

Then there is the open-source community, which the organizers are just now engaging. Any programmer who is interested is free to view the core software code on an OLPC Web site and suggest improvements. And a handful of OS efforts have formed to create applications for the computer.