I took part in the first Give One, Get One program. Totally disappointed in a lack of hand crank, but it was still a pretty sweet little machine.

I thought the OLPC directly inspired the Eee PC, which was what they should have been shooting for in the first place. And the 9" netbooks that followed really hit the spot.

As with most ambitious design projects, it's far more important that the first iteration gets produced and tested in the real world, than that the first iteration actually be a good solution to the problem.

I had the first eepc 701 running linux. it was a great little machine. After that I kept a 9001 until 2012 for travelling.

They were kind of a bitch to type on. Better than tablet-typing, though.

I remember the hype around these when first announced, and then they dropped out of sight. Interesting to learn what happened, particularly the link with the origins of netbooks. I'm typing this on a Chromebook, a spiritual successor of the cheap laptop idea, so I guess I owe this experience to the OLPC.

...
"If you remember the OLPC at all, you probably remember the hand crank. It was OLPC’s most striking technological innovation"
...
"And people are still talking about the crank"

I caught some of the buzz about these laptops and the One Laptop Per Child campaign, but I'm kind of fuzzy about the crank being there. Was the crank really a big part of their marketing?

Only to the writer of this article.

Nicholas Negroponte is the Peter Molyneux of inexpensive hand-cranked laptops.