[6] The XO was developed by Nicholas Negroponte, a co-founder of MIT's Media Lab, and designed by Yves Behar's Fuseproject company.

The subnotebooks were designed for sale to government-education systems which then would give each primary school child their own laptop.

[9] The rugged, low-power computers use flash memory instead of a hard disk drive (HDD), and come with a pre-installed operating system derived from Fedora Linux, with the Sugar graphical user interface (GUI).

The first early prototype was unveiled by the project's founder Nicholas Negroponte and then-United Nations Secretary-General Kofi Annan on November 16, 2005, at the World Summit on the Information Society (WSIS) in Tunis, Tunisia.

[citation needed] The first working prototype was demonstrated at the project's Country Task Force Meeting on May 23, 2006.

[citation needed] Steve Jobs had offered Mac OS X free of charge for use in the laptop, but according to Seymour Papert, a professor emeritus at MIT who is one of the initiative's founders, the designers wanted an operating system that can be tinkered with: "We declined because it's not open source.

In 2006, Microsoft had suddenly developed an interest in the XO project and wanted the formerly open source effort to run Windows.

[20] Quanta Computer, the project's contract manufacturer, said in February 2007 that it had confirmed orders for one million units.

[23] In 2007, the project established a website, laptopgiving.org, for outright donations and for a "Give 1 Get 1" offer valid (but only to the United States, its territories, and Canadian addresses) from November 12, 2007 until December 31, 2007.

In late 2008, the New York City Department of Education began a project to purchase large numbers of XO computers for use by schoolchildren.

It is shipped with a slimmed-down version of Fedora Linux and a custom GUI named Sugar that is intended to help young children collaborate.

Mary Lou Jepsen has listed the design goals of the device as follows:[30] In keeping with its goals of robustness and low power use, the design of the laptop intentionally omits all motor-driven moving parts; it has no hard disk drive, optical (compact disc (CD) or Digital Versatile Disc DVD) media, floppy disk drive, or fan (the device is passively cooled).

A built-in hand-crank generator was part of the notebook in the original design; however, it is now an optional clamp-on peripheral.

Jepsen developed a new display for the first-generation OLPC laptop, inspired by the design of small LCDs used in portable DVD players, which she estimated would cost about $35.

In the OLPC XO-1, the screen is estimated to be the second most costly component, after the central processing unit (CPU) and chipset.

[34] Jepsen has described the removal of the filters that color the RGB subpixels as the critical design innovation in the new LCD.

Instead of using subtractive color filters, the display uses a plastic diffraction grating and lenses on the rear of the LCD to illuminate each pixel.

When lit primarily from the rear with the white LED backlight, the display shows a color image composed of both RGB and grayscale information.

[37] When lit primarily from the front by ambient light, for example from the sun, the display shows a monochromatic (black and white) image composed of just the grayscale information.

The backlight brightness can also be adjusted to vary the level of color seen in the display and to conserve battery power.

Despite the color blurring, the display still has high resolution for its physical size; normal displays as of February 2007[update] put about 588(H) × 441(V) to 882(H) × 662(V) pixels in this amount of physical area[citation needed] and support subpixel rendering for slightly higher perceived resolution.

[citation needed] Unlike a standard RGB LCD, resolution of the XO-1 display varies with angle.

Jepsen has said the wireless chip set will be run at a low bit rate, 2 Mbit/s maximum rather than the usual higher speed 5.5 Mbit/s or 11 Mbit/s to minimize power use.

The conventional IEEE 802.11b system only handles traffic within a local cloud of wireless devices in a manner similar to an Ethernet network.

Whether Marvell Technology Group, the producer of the wireless chip set and owner of the current meshing protocol software, will make the firmware open source is still an unanswered question.

It contains a pivoting, reversible display, movable rubber Wi-Fi antennas, and a sealed rubber-membrane keyboard.

It featured one solid color multi-touch screen design, and a solar panel in the cover or carrying case.

[65] Countries are expected to remove and add software to best adapt the laptop to the local laws and educational needs.

"[54] On August 4, 2006, the Wikimedia Foundation announced that static copies of selected Wikipedia articles would be included on the laptops.

[77] The hand-crank system for powering the laptop was abandoned by designers shortly after it was announced, and the "mesh" internet-sharing approach performed poorly and was then dropped.