OLPC struggled in the early days

Taiwan Review has written up an article about the early problems of getting the OLPC project running. There were significant manufacturing hurdles to create the laptop. From the article:

"Normally, when we design a commercial notebook, we have Microsoft's Windows or other software that will run on the device."

In March 2006, when the XO-1 motherboards were ready for testing, OLPC held a "country conference," which was attended by "delegates" from the governments that intended to purchase the machine. The result was a decision to upgrade the XO-1 with a more powerful CPU. This was no minor modification.

"Change the CPU and you're talking about a completely new machine," [Dandy] Hsu says. (General manager and vice president of the Quanta's Educational Product Business Unit)

The project almost came to a halt when Quanta Display backed out of the contract to manufacture the display.

Then, later in March, came devastating news. Quanta had recently completed the sale of its subsidiary, Quanta Display, and new owner AU Optronics decided not to manufacture the XO-1 screen, the most critical component of the project.

This literally almost killed Mary Lou.

The XO-1 appeared dead. OLPC's chief technology officer, Mary Lou Jepsen, disappointed and exhausted from more than a year of intense work for OLPC, left Taiwan for home. Hours later, she was near death as well, having gone into adrenal failure on the flight to Boston.

The project was saved by a new manufacturer, Chi Mei of Taiwan.

In April 2006, two weeks after her illness, Jepsen returned to Taiwan and approached the Chi Mei Group, a Taiwan-based conglomerate, to ask if it would manufacture the XO-1's display.

Negotiations between Chi Mei and OLPC were quick. In May 2006, Jepsen and Negroponte both came to Taiwan to sign formal contracts.

AMD praises the laptop for being innovative.

Bill Edwards, chief strategy officer at AMD, the company that supplies the CPU for the XO-1, described it as the "first fundamental revisit of personal computer architecture since IBM launched the PC in 1981."

The article follows up with an interview with Mary Lou Jepsen.