OLPC XO: education and the Sinclair heritage
The One Laptop Per Child (OLPC) XO computer reminds me of some of Sir Clive Sinclair’s computers. Not, as you might think, because of the XO’s rubber-membrane keyboard, which both of Sir Clive’s most popular computer, the ZX Spectrum, and his only portable, the Z88, shared. Rather, it is that one of core aims of the OLPC XO project is to encourage children to learn about the computer they are using: “Children program the machine, not the other way around.” [see http://laptop.org/en/laptop/] In the same way, Sinclair always intended his computers to be used as educational tools. Indeed, his earliest mass market machines, the ZX80 and ZX81 were both available in kit form, requiring the user to really get to grip with how things worked. While it’s probably true that these kits only appealed to a limited hobbyist market, they did emphasis the accessibility of the machines. That accessibility remained important to Sinclair - even the hugely popular ZX Spectrum and later the Sinclair QL came with hefty manuals detailing everything about each computer as well as comprehensive programming guides. These were machines designed to teach as well as be used to perform specific tasks.
Although many people didn’t use these Sinclair computers as educational tools, preferring instead just to play games or run business applications written by others, many did go on to learn and write software for these machines; and some went on to become very successful, setting up and running their own software companies. Others built various pieces of hardware to attach to and extend these machines. For example, I remember one contemporary at my school building an interface that connected his Spectrum to a Scalextric track so that track times could be recorded. Many other interfaces were designed and sold commercially.
Of course, computers have come a long way since Sinclair’s heyday, and as computers have moved closer to being appliances they have brought with them significant benefits - not least the fact that you don’t need to be some kind of technical genius just to get the things to work. Yet as they have become easier to use, they have also become significantly more complicated to understand, in particular in terms of how they work.
We certainly can’t go back to the days of Z80 processor, where it was possible for one person to understand nearly everything about the computer he or she was programming, and on the whole that’s probably a very good thing. Yet I can’t help but feel that children are missing out by not having their own Sinclair computer to explore. That’s why I hope the OLPC project is a success. To date, OLPC have been focusing on selling the XO computer to the developing world, but I think their goal of providing “children around the world with new opportunities to explore, experiment and express themselves”, applies equally to the developed world. I hope it becomes more widely available soon, and that the current Give One Get One initiative in the US and Canada, where individuals can effectively pay for two machines and donate one of them to a child in a developing nation, is the first of many.
Tags: education, olpc, ql, sinclair, spectrum, xo, z80, z88, zx80, zx81
