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Gates’s reaction was especially tasteless. Apart from being – like, apparently, everybody else rich, powerful or famous – an old friend of Negroponte, he is the greatest philanthropist in the world. But even though he’s stepped down as the head of Microsoft, he remains almost paranoiacally defensive of Windows.

Yet, miraculously, in spite of all this the XO is still alive, clinging to the cliff face. But for how much longer?

The Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) is geek central, the greatest school of its type in the world. Along with Harvard, it dominates the city of Cambridge, across the river from Boston. MIT is a city within a city consisting of the campus but also the penumbra of gigantic, architecturally eccentric buildings in which live the high-tech companies that graze on the institute’s talent. Around Kendall Square, people shuffle along the streets lost in thought. In the cafes they read and write notes on yellow legal pads. This is where money meets IQ. It is not quite like anywhere else on Earth.

It was here that, in 1985, Negroponte founded MIT’s Media Lab with the idea of “inventing a better future”. It was an idealistic attempt to show that the computer and communications revolutions could, indeed, make the world a better place. The XO – high tech for the poor and unconnected – was the perfect embodiment of the Media Lab’s idealism.

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In the OLPC boardroom in an office in Cambridge I meet Negroponte. He is a staggeringly well-connected Greek-American from a wealthy background. The background and the connections give him a slightly remote, slightly languid, though not pompous or grand, air. His staff at OLPC regard him affectionately and with some bemusement.

A techno-utopian by nature, MIT is his natural home. And it was at MIT in 1968 that he met Seymour Papert. Papert had worked with the great educational theorist Jean Piaget. From Piaget’s work, Papert had developed the learning theory of constructionism. Put simply, this means that children learn most effectively when they are doing things rather than just sitting and listening. Negroponte became an enthusiastic constructionist. It synched with his world-transforming view of technology. Computers were to be the perfect constructionist tool, allowing children to discover and make things on their own. If Negroponte is the father of the XO, Papert is its grandfather.

“The question we were asking,” says Walter Bender, long-term Negroponte collaborator, “was not the ‘how’ of computing but the ‘why’. And the primary answer was learning.”

Constructionists tend to be sensitive creatures, primarily because they have been so angrily attacked. Children have to be told something, say the critics: they can’t just be set free to do anything they feel like. Sane constructionists accept this, but, to be honest, I do have a suspicion that they may be more geeks than educators. They want computers to work in schools because they like machines.

Through various experiments, Negroponte and his colleagues zeroed in on the idea of the computer as the key that would unlock the predicament of the world’s poor. In 1999 Negroponte built a school in Cambodia.

Then, in 2001, he suggested his son go to it and, using a satellite link and a few laptops, connect it to the internet.

“This was a very remote village – no electricity, no telephone, no TV – but the wi-fi was so well done that when I asked myself if you look at the constituent parts they were all replicable and in most cases the prices would scale down. The one exception was the laptop. That became the focus…”

Yet laptops were expensive and they never seemed to get any cheaper, they just got more complicated. They have become loaded with “bloatware” – over-featured, over-complex software. “Everything becomes like an SUV,” says Negroponte. “It’s crippling because, like an SUV, most of the power in that machine is being used to drive the machine, not you or I.”

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