OLPC Keyboard

One of the things that changed the way I look at a system was included on the OLPC keyboard. I’m afraid you can’t male it out too well in the picture, but one of the key sets across the top row changed the “view”. In eclipse IDE terms, that might be a perspective. It had three ranges – the active application, what was actively running on the laptop, and the nearby network.

I know others have had a network browser/bonjour/rendezvous/network places entry … but this put it mentally close by being something explicit on the keyboard. The guys there explained that it would show all the nearby network systems by range, which just riled within me as a great network effect. Plus it really jibed with my own sense of a network neighborhood and the distributed nature of so much upcoming technology. I’m not even sure that I can really articulate this out. I just know when I saw that function I thought “wow… That’s going to really change things.”