In 1991 there was a childrens’ television series called Dark Season. I recall thinking it was brilliant at the time. It was written by Russell T Davies, who is now the executive producer and writer of Doctor Who. The story centred on a sinister plot to take over childrens’ minds by distributing free computers.

Meanwhile, One Laptop Per Child appears to be running into difficulties. The project’s “extreme dependence on scale to bring down cost” is worryingly familiar; like collective farming, their economies of scale have not yet been great enough to overcome the massive disadvantages of central planning.

And now Brazil is rolling out KDE to 52,000,000 children. The project is called “Um Computador por Aluno” - One Computer Per Student. It may not match the headline features of OLPC, like mesh networking and a cool low-power display, but it looks more likely to work in the real world. In this respect, OLPC may be more like the Soviet space programme than the Soviet state farms: the standout achievements of the Russians, like Sputnik and Yuri Gagarin, were impressive and noteworthy, but the system ultimately couldn’t compete with the more open and dynamic American space programme.