The Fonly Institute

Not the Vision He Had

(A very slightly edited version of a comment posted to Wayan Vota's blog OLPC News upon the announcement that the OLPC laptop would be manufactured and sold in the industrial world).                               

A thought experiment - give an XO to an American kid and the question will be "what does it do?" The answers will have to be "No, it doesn't run Windows programs. No, you can't run games on it. And it looks like it's for kids because it IS for kids".

This seems to be a setup for most kids to reject it. There will be a few, however, who discover they can get into it and mess around, as well as communicate sending pictures without having to deal with the mobile phone bill and its consequences.

A whole lot more adult geeks will buy it and play with it, which is not a bad thing - I am all for play as a means of exploring the possibilities of technology. And, like the Rocky and Bullwinkle cartoons of the '60's, which were written to include some jokes with adult appeal so that kids would get the message that it was funny to older folk and thus not "just for kids", there will start to be leakage to lower age levels.

SuperHappyDevHouse

When I saw in the San Jose Mercury News that SuperHappyDevHouse was trying to "recapture the spirit of the Homebrew Computer Club", I knew I had to drop in on their event. Having designed the meeting process of Homebrew in 1975 and run the meetings until we closed up shop in 1986, I wanted to be sure that legacy was not being misrepresented. So, along with Lena, I turned up at the Hillsborough house June 23rd where the sesqui-monthly hacker play party was scheduled to take place.

I knew it was going to be a zoo, having been announced on the front page of the business/technology section of Silicon Valley's newspaper. What I wanted to see was what the zoo would be like. Checking on the web page earlier that day I saw that the count had peaked at 116, a new record.