Blasts from the Past

Remember our discovery over at OLPCNews.com of the proto-OLPC project in Senegal? Our insightful readers dug even deeper and found some more news articles from the project. To quote the Bard, "What's past is prologue" - there are frighteningly strong parallels between this failed early-80s project and today's OLPC project. I've taken the liberty to do some not-very-creative search and replacing on the article to update it to modern circumstances. You can hover over any text that I've modified to see the original (Firefox users - check out the Long Titles Addon to see the longer pieces of text). Some paragraphs I've dropped for the sake of brevity, but please feel free to read the unadulterated original article, Seymour Papert's 'Microworld': An Educational Utopia, by Charles Euchner. All the emphases are mine, but the text is relatively unadulterated. The majority of the changes were:

• LOGO becomes Squeak
• microcomputers and Apple IIs become OLPC laptops
• French / French companies become Taiwan/Quanta
• Paris-based World Center for Microprocessors and Human Resources and Microworld become OLPC Project

Let's take the first half of the article, which parallels much of the progress to date with OLPC (emphasis mine):