November 2006

Today we received the first large shipment of laptops from the factory. I’m told it’s about a thousand pounds. The boxes are all labeled with the countries the keyboards are built for: The US, Nigeria, Thailand, Argentina, Brazil and Libya.

Each of the large boxes is a “five pack” and each smaller box is a single laptop. I managed to get this shot before the feeding frenzy began.

We received our first machine in the Cambridge today from the plant. This is one of the hand-assembled models running the browser in Sugar. I have a less blurry picture that was taken using the flash, but the display doesn’t look as good.

Update: There are some more pictures in the wiki! Even one where I look pretty grumpy.

I like this idea of sunrise over OLPC because it really captures where we are today. Last night we had our first real run on an assembly line and put together roughly 200 systems. This is the first time that all of the parts have really been assembled together for testing. Those machines will start making their way out to people soon. Countries, individual open source developers, and interested parties.

I think that once these wonderful little machines get into people’s hands they will start to understand how real and serious we are. It’s not the fastest little machine in the world, but it definitely has personality and I find myself falling in love with it.

Some technical notes about these machines. First, they are very close to the final hardware builds of the machine. The only differences are that they include an FPGA-based flash controller, which will run at about half the speed of final chip, and that part of the new touchpad functionality is disabled. There we some last minute unresolved electrical problems that kept us from turning on the stylus part of the touchpad. We’ll be fixing that the next time we spin the hardware. The software on the machines is build178 which is a decent shapshot of our software. It’s alpha-quality, so there are still major bugs and missing features.

What I’m really excited about is what these machines will mean to the developer community. They will finally bring focus to what we’ve been doing over the last few months. People will get to experience how their software runs on the machine and it’s a good chance for others to get involved. We’ll be posting more information in the next few days about how you can get more involved if you have a machine. It’s going to be a fun few months for everyone.

That’s why this is just the sunrise. It’s going to be a beautiful day.