By Nicholas Negroponte, founder and chairman of One Laptop per Child
I first met Steve in 1979, when the idea of merging design and computation was considered sissy or silly. Not to Steve. A fact not widely known: He was one of the first funders (1980) of the MIT Media Lab, then a mere inkling rather than a place, with a gift of $500,000, which he could ill afford at the time.
Shortly after, my partner Jerome Wiesner introduced Steve to Edwin Land. I recall the meeting in Cambridge well. It lead to a fast friendship with Land and the subsequent strong influence of Polaroid’s graphics and style. Soon thereafter Steve was the influence, not influenced.
When I started One Laptop per Child (OLPC), the first person I went to was Steve. In 2003 I believed that the most expensive part of a laptop was the display (50-65% at the time) and the way to drop that cost, and to make a less than $100 laptop, was to project the image rather than use an LCD. We made an unfolding laptop that rear-projected the image from a tiny chip, itself possibly less than $5.
I took my mechanical model to Steve’s house in Palo Alto and showed him. He smiled. He said, “Nicholas, this looks like a science project.” Forget rear-projection. Use an LCD. He was right.
Complete Coverage: Steve Jobs
Three years later, April 2007, I brought him one of the first XO laptops, which has a wonderful and special LCD. We spent two hours. He promised to use the laptop over the weekend and write me. Three weeks later he did:
Date: Fri, 18 May 2007 20:00:08 -0700
To: Nicholas Negroponte
From: Steve Jobs
Cc: Steve JobsNicholas,
We've know each other a long time - too long for me to do anything
other than tell you what I think….the software is some of the worst
I've ever seen…Please don't be too mad at me...
Your old friend,
Steve
Harsh, but right. It took the next three years to fix the software.
I wish I could show him our tablet.
Nicholas Negroponte is founder and chairman of the One Laptop per Child non-profit association, and formerly co-founder and director of the MIT Media Lab.
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