Hilaire Fernandes wrote:
<straightThoughMode>
I always feel sad how OLPC missed the Smalltalk/Morph/Etoys opportunity, both from the technical point of view but also and more importantly from the educative point of view.
I hope you are aware that I have been developing a Smalltalk-only computer for education for many years (way before OLPC was started). Until a couple of months ago it was just me and I was working on my own Neo Smalltalk design, but currently there is a growing group around the project and the focus is now Squeak.
Please note that the Sugar project has my full support, as do the OLPC hardware projects (both the current one and the future XO-2). No solution is perfect and we need to offer the teachers and children alternatives.
You have already mentioned several advantages of a Squeak machine and I agree, which is why I have been working on it. Another advantage is the possibility of costing less - while some people are feeling contrained by the 256MB in the XO-1 it is easy to imagine SqueakNOS running on 64MB or less, for example. A custom Squeak processor should use up less energy to get the same result as a x86 with a software VM.
The most obvious problem of a Squeak-only machine is that you wouldn't have Firefox nor OpenOffice. I am typing this in the Squeak email client, Celeste, and it is pretty crude compared to Kmail and others. And Etoys itself is "the demo that wouldn't die" which we hope can be improved considerably. So we will need to invest heavily to clean things up before this can be an acceptable alternative to Sugar/"normal" Linux/Mac/Windows. It is part of our plan to get funds to allow us to do so.
-- Jecel