As you can see from the lack of updates over the past 1 1/2 weeks I did a good job of staying away from doing any work during between Christmas and New Year. I did however spend quite a bit of time reading all kinds of articles, blog-posts, and research papers related to OLPC and Sugar.

Among them was also Walter Bender's look back at the early days of Sugar. I had been aware of the general history of Sugar but it was really great to be able to read his account and learn some details which I hadn't known before.

Here's a short excerpt:

Sugar in late 2007 ~ early 2008

Much of the early development of Sugar took place in the MIT Media Lab. We began in the spring of 2006, in parallel with the work of the teams responsible for developing other aspects of the XO laptop's software, including device drivers, power management, and security. One might ask how OLPC was able to create an entirely new learning platform from whole cloth, and do so with almost no investment in software engineering. The short answer is that they didn't. OLPC solved the problem of how to develop the Sugar software with limited resources by attracting external resources--not creating them from scratch--while articulating clearly defined objectives. OLPC built upon decades of research into how to engineer software to promote learning and amplified OLPC's staff resources by leveraging key partnerships within the Free Software movement. ...

Continue reading the full post over on Walter Bender's Web site.