It is interesting to consider the vastly different (yet similarly targeted) Apple eMate of 1997 and the OLPC pof 2007. Floating about the internet currently is a really cool screen capture of the ‘Sugar’ interface used by the One Laptop Per Child (OLPC) project. OLPC seems to have stuck for the last little while. I know that for a time the project seems to have had a new name every week. Its seems to have stabilized as of late and this look at the interface is fascinating. You can of course choose to emulate the OLPC experience on your own machine, but as this is a rather involved process and most people don’t get quite the amusement I do from tinkering with such things this is a great little window into what the OLPC
is going to feel like on the software front. However, when considering Sugar I was struck by the comparison with Apple’s ill-fated? eMate 300 Newton. I wish I had pciked one of these up when I had the chance, but then that’s still think about my old museum of computiquity…and that’s largely gone, alas. Nonetheless, the comparison is there. Apple attenpted to come out with a low cost computing alternative to the pricier laptops of the time. Technologically, the eMate was advanced in many ways and yet, it was severely limited in others…can you say OLPC. One wonders if Nicholas Negroponte’s crew has learned from this example. Here’s a bit of a tabular comparison:
