Give One, Get One... Later

Where's the Beef Laptop?

After waiting patiently over a month to receive my "Get One" latptop from the One Laptop Per Child's "Give One, Get One" promotion, I finally got around to calling their 800 number a week or so ago to see what the story was.  Looks like I'm going to have to wait a bit longer...

So, like I said, I called the 800 number and, a moderate wait time later, was greeted by a very friendly and sympathetic support person. Once she was able to pull up my information, we discovered the culprit...  The way that the PayPal fields mapped up to the OLPC database basically dropped half of my address.  Yes, line 2, the important one where I put the actual street address, because I placed "Congruent Media" on line one, had vanished into the ether.  Apparently, the delivery service doesn't know the location for "Congruent Media, Baltimore, MD 21224"...  (Who coded that, the same people that forgot to convert from metric to English a few years back during that Mars Climate Orbiter fiasco?  That would never have happend if the OLPC had hired Congruent Media to do the job!)

At any rate, after we got that corrected, she informed me of the good/bad news - my laptop wouldn't ship until the end of March or the beginning of April, because they were out of computers and in the process of assembling more.  To me, that's great news, in that their "Give One, Get One" promotion was a huge success!  So, presumably, some time in April that box will show up at the office and I'll be able to pop it open and experiment with this crazy $200 computer they're building for the children of the Developing World and, well, children everywhere...

Why'd I Want the Beef Laptop Anyway?

So it's along story (or maybe a short one).  Sure, it'll be cool to mess around with the OLPC's cheap, robust gizmo, put it through its paces, and see if I can use it in my plans for world domination.  But really, the story begins back in the 1980s.  You remember the 1980s, right?  That time where everyone had outrageous haircuts, the Ford Mustang traded in its classically cool look for something boxy out the future, Knight Rider was on television and people actually thought David Hasselhoff could act, Reagan was President, and having a 16 color monitor was cool?  (If you don't remember the 1980s, you can catch the highlights on VH1.)

Anyway, when I was a kid, back in the 1980s, one of the single most important decisions my parents ever made was to purchase a used IBM PC Junior from our neighbors across the street.  For those of you that are historically challenged (go watch the VH1 highlights), the PC Junior sported a 4 color monitor, a 5 1/2 inch floy drive, and amazing 64 KB of RAM.  You had these solid-state cartridges you'd plug in to get into the BASIC programmng shell.  Yeah, you know, maybe one or two steps above punch cards...

Like I was saying, when I was a kid, back in the 1980s, my parents bought this used PC Junior from our neighbors, and suddenly my brother and I were exposed to a whole new world of possibilities.  Being the precocious children that we were, we dove right in.  The gloves were off within weeks, and soon we were pushing that machine as far as we could go.  As technology progressed, we upgraded to a 286.  I remember that time fondly.  I coded up a drawing program in BASIC (the old, old BASIC, that had line numbers, with GOTO statements, and no GUI interface) - you could use the arrow keys to move around on the screen, draw basic, paint boxes, and even save your images!

The point is, I became comfortable with technology, with using it, with modifying it's components, with the fact that if I broke it, I could fix it - no big deal - just a few hours of tinkering around.  Now I'm designing crazy Internet applications and my brother is installing and maintaining VOIP systems.  Without that exposure to jump start us, I don't think either of us would be in the fortunate position we're in today.  Sure, we would have eventually been exposed to computers in school, but we would have missed out on those crucial formative experiences.  Instead of creating things with technology, we'd likely only just be consumers of it.

We were fortunate enough to have parents who could afford to buy us that first piece of technology.  The majority of the world's children, however, don't have parents that can afford that luxury.  Every child deserves a chance to succeed, and variouis organizations throughout the economically developed world have have been attempting (for a long time) to better the condition of children, and especially poor children, in our countries and abroad, through various means.  We've given money.  We've given food and other kinds of aid.  We've built schools.  Now the OLPC has come along and thought - "Let's give them TECHNOLOGY".  This is a novel approach, and not necessarily the most intuitive.  But this may be the missing piece of the puzzle - who knows? 

We've moved from the Industrial Age into the Technology Age, and one of the most important skills anyone can have is the ability to confidently use a computer for a productive purpose.  It's that whole "give a fish / teach them how to fish" proverb... and to fish in this age, you need a hard-drive and a connection to the Internet.