Dynabook Concepts

Dealers of Lightning

by Michael A. Hiltzik · 27 Apr 2000 · 559pp · 157,112 words

, established to commercialize PARC technology William R. (Bert) Sutherland, manager (1975–1981) Alan C. Kay, head of the Learning Research Group (LRG), conceptualizer of the “Dynabook” personal computer and Smalltalk programming language Daniel H. Ingalls, LRG member, developer of “BitBlt” graphic program and principal developer of Smalltalk Adele Goldberg, LRG member

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. July: Alan C. Kay’s doctoral dissertation, “The Reactive Engine,” is accepted at the University of Utah; within it are found the seeds of his “Dynabook” personal computer. October-December: The ARPANET, precursor to the Internet, becomes formally operational, with four nodes” up and running. January: George Pake accepts the job

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in a public session to pitch his vision of a computer you could hold in your hand. He had already coined a name for it: “Dynabook,” a notebook-shaped machine with a display screen and a keyboard you could use to create, edit, and store a very personal sort of literature

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simple enough for a child to use yet powerful enough to slake the human thirst for creativity. Kay imagined an invention called the “KiddiComp” or “Dynabook.” To make the abstraction tangible, he built himself a model box about nine inches by twelve and a half inches deep, with a flat screen

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-class talents. If all these people were to converge at PARC under Bob Taylor, there was no telling what they could accomplish—even build his Dynabook. One night he and Taylor stayed up nearly until dawn, batting around the possibilities implicit in a conjuncture of Xerox’s money, Kay’s ideas

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optimism. Kay had the feeling he might finally be within striking distance of turning some of his great ideas into reality. He had reworked his Dynabook concept into something he called “miniCom,” a keyboard, screen, and processor bundled into a portable, suitcase-sized package. Meanwhile, the software aces he had brought

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promoter, producing a steady stream of articles and conference abstracts, often illustrated with his own hand drawings of children in bucolic settings playing with their Dynabook, to proclaim the death of the mainframe and the advent of the “personal computer.” By the spring of 1972 he was ready for the next

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and rake them together in one great pile. Thacker and Lampson regarded Kay as a prime donor. For one thing, the architecture of his cherished Dynabook, or miniCom, or Kiddicomp—whatever he was calling the thing in its latest incarna-tion—corresponded neatly with their own visions of the ideal personal

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for everybody.” By combining the latest electronic components coming into the market with their own powerful intellects, they might just pull it off. Not the Dynabook in all its interactive glory, perhaps, but a giant leap in the right direction—in Kay’s words, an “interim

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Dynabook.” Hearing their offer, Kay could barely contain his excitement—until he realized they might still face one important obstacle. “What are you going to do

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philosophical core of the design came from Bob Taylor, who also supplied the machine’s name (Alan Kay never entirely ceased calling it the “interim Dynabook”). As Taylor constantly informed his top engineers, time-sharing’s success in making computing more accessible to the user quantitatively was only part of the

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pixels meant that nearly a half-million bits needed to be refreshed thirty times per second. (Kay envisioned a one-million-pixel display for his Dynabook, but had to be satisfied with what he got.) Once it was running, however, it made believers out of skeptics. Not the least important of

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their machines like drivers of Volkswagen Beetles, painting them in bright colors and christening them with considerable ceremony. Kay named his first so-called interim Dynabook “Bilbo,” after J. R. R. Tolkien’s heroic Hobbit. John Ellenby, a Briton who was placed in charge of readying the Alto design for large

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recalled, the group spent much of the daytime “outside of PARC, playing tennis, bike-riding, drinking beer, eating Chinese food, and constantly talking about the Dynabook and its potential to amplify human reach and bring new ways of thinking to a faltering civilization that desperately needed it (that kind of goal

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to PARC and implementing some unprecedented new idea on the spot had evaporated. To Kay the team had lost its balance. The idea of a Dynabook for Children had “dimmed out,” overwhelmed by everyone’s professional imperatives and their desire to elaborate on what were now, to him, old ideas. Kay

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’ fixation on building the Dorado helped fuel the Notetaker team’s inclination to go in the opposite direction. Given CSL’s determination to pervert the Dynabook concept by building a machine bigger than the Alto, “it’ll be a long time before we have the

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Dynabook,” Goldberg said one day. “Let’s do something that’s between the Alto and the Dynabook.” In time she came to think of the Notetaker as an electronic notebook for kids to use in

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the eMate,” he added, referring to a small school- oriented laptop Apple Computer manufactured years later which bore a striking resemblance to Kay’s original Dynabook sketches. “She knew it had to be somewhat heavier than the eMate, though she was hoping it wouldn’t turn out to be what it

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already yielded to his familiar feelings of despair. The Notetaker was enticingly similar to the old cardboard model he had once used to illustrate the Dynabook. But his unquiet nature was to focus not on how close it came but on where it fell short. His outward glee at creating a

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got Smalltalk demos over the years, and one whose representatives further seemed “remarkably interesting and innovative.” The agency’s manifest curiosity about Smalltalk and the Dynabook could not help but give those technologies and their inventors added credibility within Xerox, she figured—and at the very least, she said later, the

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CIA people touring PARC had needs that fit perfectly with the Dynabook’s capabilities for ordering and communicating information. By contrast, the liberal-minded Tesler treated the CIA visit as a chance for Berkeley-style agitprop. The

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, 250–53, 320 Dorado, xvii, 318–21, 322, 324–26, 327 Doriot, Georges, 25 Dover, 265–66, 310 Draw, 212 Duvall, William, 205, 307, 399 Dynabook, xiii, 94, 163, 164, 175, 211, 216, 321, 327, 336 Minicom and, 163–67 EARS, 141–42, 191–92 Eastman Kodak, 56, 259, 269 ECL

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, 314–15 Dealer and, 146departure from PARC, 327–28 Disney and, 81, 82, 83display and, 124, 173–74dissertation (“The Reactive Engine”) and, xiii, 93–94 Dynabook and, xiii, 94, 163, 164, 175, 211, 216, 321, 327, 336 Ethernet and, 190 FLEX machine and, 79, 93–94, 109graphical user interface and, 141graphics

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, 383–84intrapreneuring and, 312–13 PARC culture and, 278software course following Futures Day and, 274 Kennedy, John F., 11 Keyset, POLOS and, 201 KiddiComp. See Dynabook Kissinger, Henry, 269 Laboratory Instrument Computer. See LINC Lahr, Roy, 334–35, 338, 339, 340 Lampson, Butler W., 69–70, 71, 78, 94, 118, 227

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, 122–24 Penguin, 285 Personal computer, xxiii, 95, 391 Altair 8800 and, xvi, 323, 333, 334 Dorado and, xvii, 318–21, 322, 324–26, 327 Dynabook and, xiii, 94, 163–67, 175, 211, 216, 321, 327, 336 IBM PC and, xviii, xxiv, 212, 360, 368–69, 370, 389, 391, 395 Kay

The Dream Machine: J.C.R. Licklider and the Revolution That Made Computing Personal

by M. Mitchell Waldrop · 14 Apr 2001

, and so irrepressible that they lis- tened anyway. When it was his turn to give a presentation, Kay told them about his idea for a "Dynabook," a little computer that you could carry around in one hand like a notebook. One face would be a screen that would display formatted text

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and graphics and that you could draw or write on as if it were a pad of paper. The Dynabook would communicate with other computers via radio and THE INTERGALACTIC NETWORK 283 infrared. It would be so simple to program that even a kid could

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profound: a personal dynamic medium." :- And that, in turn, led di- rectly to a "clear romantic vision" of what a personal computer should be. The Dynabook, he called it. "I remembered Aldus Manutius who forty years after the printing press put the book into its modern dimensions by making it fit

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into saddlebags," he wrote. By the same logic, the Dynabook would have to be no larger than a notebook. "Now it was easy to know what to do next. I built a card- board model

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freedom offered by the stylus and the more limited but faster keyboard. Since ARPA was starting to experiment with packet radio, I expected that the Dynabook, when it arrived a decade or so hence, would have a wireless networking system." 13 Kay's direction was set. FLEX, alas, was only the

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Ph.D. dissertation at Utah-both devoted to FLEX-he went off to the Stanford AI Lab, where he spent far more time thinking about Dynabooks than he did about artificial intelligence. And then in September of 1970, when he already had a deal about where to go next-Allen Newell

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and Gordon Bell had invited him to come build Dynabooks at Carnegie Mellon-he received a visit from an old Utah buddy named Bob Taylor. Kay remembers being dubious at first. Work for a company

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he do there? he asked. "Follow your instincts," said Taylor. Kay immediately set to work on designs for the KiddiKomp, a kind of in- terim Dynabook that would allow him to experiment with various approaches to the notebook's user interface. And then, he says, when Taylor recruited the BCC gang

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consultant to PARC!" By this point, however, Kay had also had to admit to himself that he wasn't going to get anywhere with his Dynabook notion until he'd gathered a group of researchers who could help him; left to his own devices, he just didn't have the temperament

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notebook model and say, 'Advance that.' "14 During that same summer of 1971, meanwhile, Kay was refining his Kid- diKomp idea into a new interim Dynabook design that he called the miniCOM. 362 THE DREAM MACHINE Among other things, it would feature a brand-new object-oriented programming language that Kay

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by the Apple Macintosh and Microsoft Windows. Kay himself, for example, designed a "paint" program so that the kids who would one day use his Dynabook could sketch their own computer graphics. His design was implemented by Steve Percell, a student intern from Stanford, and then integrated with a line-drawing

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-albeit with a heavy emphasis on "eventually." Al- though they'd all had a fine time listening to Alan Kay talk about Smalltalk and his Dynabook idea, says Lampson, "we saw it as interesting from an intellectual point of view, not for building systems." When it came to serious computing, he

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care about time-sharing anymore." Alan Kay thought so, too. When Thacker and Lampson came by that Sep- tember offering to collaborate on an "Interim Dynabook," he didn't hesitate for a minute. Here was the "vector sum" of his own dream of a graphical notebook computer, Lampson's vision of

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of what kind of applications could run on the thing. And they would most definitely have to come up with a better name than Interim Dynabook. That last point was one of Taylor's particular obsessions. "Good names for prototypes are very important, and very difficult to choose," Taylor explains. "They

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sexiest piece of Alto software anywhere. It was more than just a programming language, after all; it was the prototype interface for Alan Kay's Dynabook, the complete environment for ex- ploiting this miraculous new medium to its fullest. It was also quite explicitly in- tended for children. "Early on," Kay

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being a perky little micro that would feature a very P ARC-like graphical user interface-and, on the inside, the Motorola 68000. Even Mr. Dynabook himself came over. Alan Kay never returned to PARC after his one-year sabbatical; instead, he had Apple set him up in his own lab

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and Orthodonua, 433,434 Dorado, 387 DOS (Disk Operating System), 252,435 dnvers, 426 "Duplex Theory of Pitch Percep- tIOn" (LicklIder), 68 Duvall, BIll, 362 Dynabook, 282-83, 360-62, 367-68,383 dynamic modelmg, 182-83, 256 DynamIC Modelmg research group, 304, 317-20,413, 454 INDEX 493 Eastern JOInt

The Innovators: How a Group of Inventors, Hackers, Geniuses and Geeks Created the Digital Revolution

by Walter Isaacson · 6 Oct 2014 · 720pp · 197,129 words

Brand.61 Kay realized that he needed a catchy name for the little personal computer he wanted to build, so he began calling it the Dynabook. He also came up with a cute name for its operating system software: Smalltalk. The name was meant to be unintimidating to users and not

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was so innocuous a label that if it ever did anything nice, people would be pleasantly surprised,” Kay noted. He was determined that his proposed Dynabook would cost less than $500 “so that we could give it away in schools.” It also had to be small and personal, so that “a

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programming language that was user-friendly. “Simple things should be simple, complex things should be possible,” he declared.62 Kay wrote a description of the Dynabook, titled “A Personal Computer for Children of All Ages,” that was partly a product proposal but mostly a manifesto. He began by quoting Ada Lovelace

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: “The Analytical Engine weaves algebraical patterns just as the Jacquard loom weaves flowers and leaves.” In describing how children (of all ages) would use a Dynabook, Kay showed he was in the camp of those who saw personal computers primarily as tools for individual creativity rather than as networked terminals for

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of its use will involve reflexive communication of the owner with himself through this personal medium, much as paper and notebooks are currently used.” The Dynabook, Kay continued, should be no larger than a notebook and weigh no more than four pounds. “The owner will be able to maintain and edit

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.”63 It was an enticing vision of the future, but one that would take another two decades to invent. To advance his crusade for the Dynabook, Kay gathered around him a small team and crafted a mission that was romantic, aspirational, and vague. “I only hired people that got stars in

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,” Kay recalled. “A lot of daytime was spent outside of PARC, playing tennis, bike riding, drinking beer, eating Chinese food, and constantly talking about the Dynabook and its potential to amplify human reach and bring new ways of thinking to a faltering civilization that desperately needed it.”64 In order to

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take the first step toward realizing the Dynabook, Kay proposed an “interim” machine. It would be about the size of a carry-on suitcase and would have a small graphical display screen. In

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a rapid-fire series of such questions, Kay felt like crawling away. When it was over, he cried. His request that a set of interim Dynabooks be built was denied.65 Bill English, who had worked with Engelbart and built the first mouse, was by then at PARC. After the meeting

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Kay scaled back his dream and proposed an interim-interim plan. He would use $230,000 that he had in his budget to emulate the Dynabook on a Nova, a footlocker-size minicomputer made by Data General. But the prospect didn’t really thrill him. That is when two stars from

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, about $230K for Novas,” Kay replied. “Why?” “How would you like us to build your little machine for you?” they asked, referring to the interim Dynabook that Elkind had shot down. “I’d like it fine,” Kay allowed.67 Thacker wanted to build his own version of a personal computer, and

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them to achieve the impossible. The machine they designed was named the Xerox Alto (although Kay stubbornly continued to refer to it as “the interim Dynabook”). It had a bitmapped display, which meant that each pixel on the screen could be turned on or off to help render a graphic, a

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Kay, of Sesame Street’s Cookie Monster holding the letter “C.” Alan Kay (1940– ) at Xerox PARC in 1974. Kay’s 1972 sketch for a Dynabook. Lee Felsenstein (1945– ). The first issue, October 1972. By keeping children (of all ages) in mind, Kay and his colleagues advanced Engelbart’s concepts by

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/Corbis Whole Earth Catalog cover: Whole Earth Catalog Engelbart: SRI International First mouse: SRI International Brand: SRI International Kay: Courtesy of the Computer History Museum Dynabook: Courtesy of Alan Kay Felsenstein: Cindy Charles People’s Computer Company cover: DigiBarn Computer Museum Ed Roberts: Courtesy of the Computer History Museum Popular Electronics

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Juan (Byron), ref1 Doriot, Georges, ref1 Dorsey, Jack, ref1 DOS, ref1 Dr. Dobb’s Journal, ref1 Drucker, Peter, ref1 Duke University, ref1 Dummer, Geoffrey, ref1 Dynabook, ref1, ref2 Dyson, Freeman, ref1 Dyson, George, ref1, ref2, ref3, ref4 Earnest, Les, ref1, ref2 Easy Writer, ref1 Eckert, J. Presper, ref1, ref2, ref3, ref4

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, ref3, ref4, ref5 Internet created by, ref1 Kapor, Mitch, ref1 Kasparov, Garry, ref1, ref2 Kay, Alan, ref1, ref2, ref3, ref4, ref5, ref6, ref7, ref8, ref9 Dynabook proposed by, ref1, ref2 personal computers foreseen by, ref1, ref2, ref3 recruited to PARC, ref1 Kay, Michael, ref1 Kaypro, ref1 Kelly, John E., III, ref1

Tools for Thought: The History and Future of Mind-Expanding Technology

by Howard Rheingold · 14 May 2000 · 352pp · 120,202 words

design stage. Alan Kay was already thinking about a special kind of very powerful and portable personal computer that he later came to call "the Dynabook." Everybody, from the programmers in the "software factory" who designed the software operating system and programming tools, to the hardware engineers of the Alto prototype

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working personal computer in their own hands as soon as possible. In 1971, Alan wrote and thought about something that wasn't yet called a Dynabook but looked very much like it. Kay's Learning Research Group, including Adele Goldberg, Dan Ingalls, and others, began to create Smalltalk, the programming "environment

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snapshot is the equivalent to about four million dots.) The Alto computer being constructed for PARC researchers -- which the Learning Research Group called "an interim Dynabook" -- would have around half a million dots. The technique by which the Alto would achieve its high-resolution screen was called "bit-mapping," a term

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available before except through the medium of an individual teacher. We think the implications are vast and compelling. A dynamic medium for creative thought: the Dynabook. Imagine having your own self-contained knowledge navigator in a portable package the size and shape of an ordinary notebook. Suppose it had enough power

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like to remember and change. The Learning Research Group introduced students from the nearby Jordan Middle School in Palo Alto to what they called "interim Dynabooks." Nearly a decade before keyboards and display screens became familiar appliances, these children were introduced to a device no child and only a few computer

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edit graphics; e.g., instead of typing in a command to invoke a graphics cursor, a child could point to a paintbrush icon. The interim Dynabook could be used to read or write an old-fashioned book, complete with illustrations, but it could also do much more: "It need not be

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they gained the ability to make their own choices about how to view the universe of information at their fingertips. The editing capabilities of the Dynabook made it possible to display and change every object in the Smalltalk microworld. Text and graphics could be manipulated by pointing at icons and lists

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through the keyboard. The structure of the Smalltalk language, the tools used by the first-time user to learn how to get around in the Dynabook, and the visual or auditory displays were deliberately designed to be mutable and movable in the same way: "Animation, music, and programming," wrote Kay and

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common framework for expressing those ideas." A "musical score capture system" called OPUS and a graphic animation tool called SHAZAM were part of the Smalltalk-Dynabook toolkit. In 1977, Scientific American's annual theme edition was dedicated to the subject of "Microelectronics." Alan Kay's contribution to the issue, "Microlectronics and

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, however, the book, and now the personal computer, can become among the society's main vehicles for the transmission of knowledge. The difference between a Dynabook of the future and all the libraries of the past, however, would depend upon the dynamic nature of this medium. A library is a passive

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repository of cultural treasures. You have to go in and dig out your own meanings. A Dynabook would combine the addictive allure of a good video game with the cultural resources of a library and a museum, with the expressive power of

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find images to help them in their effort to materialize a mass-marketable version of Bush's Memex, Engelbart's Augmentation Workshop, and Kay's Dynabook. Those people who are attempting to design these devices share an assumption that such machines will evolve from today's computer technology into something that

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them back into the fantasy. It's an idea that seems to be as far ahead of today's entertainment software as Alan Kay's Dynabook was ahead of the computer hardware of the 1960s. Assume that you can simulate a medieval castle and give an audience member a 360 degree

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already on their way to being commonplace. The visual displays will grow far more sophisticated, and the computers' processing power will increase as prices drop. Dynabooks and ARPAnets are suddenly not limited to research laboratories or military bureaucracies. On-line interactive communities are evolving right now, all around the world, through

Insanely Great: The Life and Times of Macintosh, the Computer That Changed Everything

by Steven Levy · 2 Feb 1994 · 244pp · 66,599 words

on Small talk through most of the 1970s. The original idea was to use it as the operating system of Kay's dream computer, the Dynabook. ''A dynamic media for creative thought," Kay called it. "Imagine having your own self-contained knowledge manipulator in a portable package the size and shape

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anything else you would like to remember and change." But it wasn't too long before Kay ran up against the impossibility of producing a Dynabook until close to the millennium, if then. The state of technology in 1971, as it would be twenty years later, was insufficiently advanced to implement

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Kay's ideas. Instead of sulking about this unpleasant reality, Kay kept talking about the Dynabook, and word about it spread so widely that it is probably one of the most influential computers in history, though it has never been built

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. The Dynabook turned out to become less a real object than a vision for an object. Everyone in the industry knows what a Dynabook is, and regards it as a sort of technological bull's-eye to aim for

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. Indeed, Macintosh itself was explicitly designed as something that would evolve into the Dynabook. (Steve Jobs once fed a slogan to his team: Mac in a Book in five years. It took eight.) The Alan Kay style of virtual

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designing, which he continued long after visualizing the Dynabook, consists of creating imaginative abstractions of what can be, going through the motions of gathering a team to build the thing, and discovering important new

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. There were Michelangelos at P ARC. In a shockingly brief time, they managed to produce a working computer that ran Smalltalk, sort of an interim Dynabook. This was the Alto. Buder Lampson, a Harvard-trained physicist-turned-computer-scientist shared Kay's vision of transforming computers from the exotic to the

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personal. Though he knew that Kay's design specifications' for the Dynabook were entirely too demanding, he also understood that recent advances in technology would enable relatively tiny machines to do heavy-duty computation that, paradoxically, would

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had yet produced. A one-piece tool that fit underneath an airline seat. It combined aspects of the PARC philosophy, including the portability of the Dynabook, with the utilitarianism of the Apple II. (But not a mouse- Raskin hated anything that took one's hands off the keyboard.) You would flick

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those previous achievements. He called it Magic Slate. As Atkinson later explained to me, this was the latest iteration of Alan Kay's dream, the Dynabook. It was to be a flat panel of liquid crystal display, about the size and heft of a few legal pads: perhaps an inch thick

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an instant's pause Atkinson nodded vigorously. "I wanted Magic Slate so bad I could taste it," Atkinson said. But as the case with the Dynabook, the idea was too far ahead of reality. He believed that Magic Slate would be possible if Apple had been inclined to pursue long-range

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plotted by this trajectory? John Sculley seemed to think so. His beliefs and desires were reflected in a creation of his own. Like Kay's Dynabook (an obvious inspiration, especially considering that the Apple chairman regularly met with Kay), Sculley's creation was a fantasy construct that would never be tested

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muster the wherewithal to compress the Macintosh experience into a notebook-sized computer. It was called the PowerBook, a conscious nod ro Alan Kay's Dynabook. At one of the early Macintosh retreats, Steve Jobs had written on a blackboard, "Mac in a book in five years." He was only off

Machines of Loving Grace: The Quest for Common Ground Between Humans and Robots

by John Markoff · 24 Aug 2015 · 413pp · 119,587 words

, spent a year at SAIL, and would later say it was one of the least productive years of his career. He already had fashioned his Dynabook idea—“a personal computer for children of all ages”27—that would serve as the spark for a generation of computing, but he remained an

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that seventy-five dollars a month, not including terminal hardware and communications connectivity costs, might be a reasonable fee. He later described PARC’s Alto/Dynabook design prototype—the template for all future personal computers—as “Xerox Heresies.” Alan Kay, who would become one of the main heretics, passed through SAIL

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briefly during his time teaching at Stanford. He was already carrying his “interim” Dynabook around and happily showing it off: a wooden facsimile preceding laptops by more than a decade. Kay hated his time in McCarthy’s lab. He

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his “one last thing.” By acquiring Siri he took his final bow for reshaping the computing world. He bridged the gap between Alan Kay’s Dynabook and the Knowledge Navigator, the elaborate Apple promotional video imagining a virtual personal assistant. The philosophical distance between AI and IA had resulted in two

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the Knowledge Navigator software avatar that John Sculley had extolled in a futuristic video in 1987. Like Alan Kay, who started out by building “interim” Dynabooks, during the next two decades Cheyer repeatedly developed prototypes, each of which more closely approximated the capabilities of the Knowledge Navigator. He was building software

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’s autobiographical Odyssey. Kay’s idea centered on “a wonderful fantasy machine called the Knowledge Navigator,”4 which wove together a number of his original Dynabook ideas with concepts that would ultimately take shape in the form of the World Wide Web. Alan Kay would later say that John Sculley had

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asked him to come up with a “modern Dynabook,” which he found humorous, since at the time his original Dynabook still didn’t exist. He said that in response to Sculley’s request, he had pulled together a variety of

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ideas from his original Dynabook research and the artificial intelligence community, as well as from MIT Media Laboratory director Nicholas Negroponte, an advocate of speech interfaces.5 Negroponte had created

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.John McCarthy, “Programs with Common Sense,” Stanford University, 1959, http://www-formal.stanford.edu/jmc/mcc59.pdf. 27.“The Dynabook of Alan Kay,” History of Computers, http://history-computer.com/ModernComputer/Personal/Dynabook.html. 28.Robert Geraci, Apocalyptic AI: Visions of Heaven in Robotics, Artificial Intelligence, and Virtual Reality, reprint edition (New

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–188 Program on Liberation Technology, 16, 342 SHRDLU, 132, 170–172, 174–178 Wozniak, Steve, 112, 214 Wyrobek, Keenan, 258 Xerox Alto, 189, 198, 255 Dynabook, 115, 198, 306 graphical interface of, 189, 194 Internet of Things and, 193 Jobs and, 281 Kay and, 115 Palo Alto Research Center inception and

Bootstrapping: Douglas Engelbart, Coevolution, and the Origins of Personal Computing (Writing Science)

by Thierry Bardini · 1 Dec 2000

Augmentation of Hu- man Intellect, a direction that ultimately led to the Apple computer and a much, much broader range of actual users. FROM THE DYNABOOK TO THE ALTO Alan Kay learned how to program computers in the Air Force in the early 1960's. He returned to college to study

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(Smith and Alexander 1988, 71). Following this strategy, Kay's Flex evolved both as a machine, the Dyna- book, and as a language, Smalltalk. The Dynabook enriched the early vision of Flex on the basis of the computer as a medium: Kay described it as a "dy- namic" medium "for creative

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's mind, and several months later, he managed to convince his colleagues at CSL, Butler Lampson and Chuck Thacker, especially, to build him "an interim Dynabook." Or, at least, that is the way it is represented in the journalistic his- toriography of the genesis of the personal computer. In fact, the

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Alto (the name of this "interim Dynabook" to be) was quite different from its never- born parent, the Dynabook. Instead, it corresponded to a further step in a chain of translations from Flex to the Alto. This "interim

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Dynabook" resulted from the enrollment of Alan Kay's col- leagues at P ARC in his project and thus demonstrated a series of changes in the

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a machine that you can carry around and children could use" (quoted in Perry and Wallich 1985). In this negotiation, one main feature of the Dynabook was lost: the Alto would not be portable. George Pake, a physicist and former provost of Wash- ington University who had been hired in 1970

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prom- ising new idea, I did not see any sensible way to crank up PARC research toward The Arrival of the Real User 153 a Dynabook display. Meanwhile, I said, there are many other research issues to be addressed -why not put aside the requirement for portabIlIty and see if you

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can configure a hardware-software system that IS prototypical of Dynabook's workstation power? (Pake 19 8 5 ) In December 1972, Butler Lampson issued a lab-wide memorandum en- titled "Why Alto" that described this new

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at the Xerox Palo Alto Research Center think that the idea of a "personal" computer itself is misplaced and that the viSIon of laptop machines, dynabooks and "knowledge navigators" is only a transitional step to- ward achieving the real potentIal of information technology. Such machines can- not truly make computing an

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, 25 - 26, 23 6nIo Joystick, 110, 250n6 Kahn, Robert, 19 2 , 258n7 Kay, Alan, 149-52, 163-67; and "The Reactive Engine," 150; and the Dynabook, 151-52; and Smalltalk, 151, 169. See also Illusion; and un- der Interface: modeless Kaye, Diane, 200 Kennedy, John Fitzgerald, 21 Kinesthesia, 54, 24 2n2

What the Dormouse Said: How the Sixties Counterculture Shaped the Personal Computer Industry

by John Markoff · 1 Jan 2005 · 394pp · 108,215 words

single computer; now, the computer would become a personal assistant. The notion flowed directly from Vannevar Bush’s Memex, and Xerox researcher Alan Kay’s Dynabook—a fantasy concept of a powerful, wirelessly networked portable computer—was to embody the idea a decade later. Indeed, it has become one of the

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, where two of the nation’s most prominent computer scientists, Allen Newell and Gordon Bell, had been actively recruiting him to come build his beloved Dynabook—the portable computing machine that had gradually emerged from his computers-for-kids fantasies. He had met the two researchers when ARPA’s technology office

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able to travel widely and meet many of the reigning AI and computer-design gurus. At the time, however, Kay was deeply into his “interim” Dynabook design project and was mocking up computers to communicate his portable fantasy. Bell and Newell were so taken with the idea that they recruited him

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being encouraged by a profusion of bike lanes. He grew to love the minimalism that cycling represented and even drew parallels between it and his Dynabook vision. A bicycle for the mind—maybe Engelbart’s notion about computer-as-vehicle wasn’t so wrongheaded. It was an idea that Apple Computer

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was nowhere near the holy grail of personal computing that Kay was pursuing. He had taken to describing his computing ideas in terms of “interim” Dynabooks—prototype machines that would permit researchers to begin exploring the idea of personal computing. One of the ideas he began calling Minicom. Kay made wood

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of their research. During their days in the mountains, they discussed one another’s dreams for future computers. The researchers already knew about Kay’s Dynabook, and other ideas were presented as well. Chuck Thacker wanted to build a computer that was ten times faster than a Nova. Butler Lampson wanted

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that Kay and his group assembled in 1973 was finally available to anyone with a few thousand dollars. And it was decades before his original Dynabook concept became a commercial reality. In 1972, the first microprocessors had just been introduced, and they were far too puny to power anything other than

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Bill English’s POLOS group. Tesler was hesitant because it sounded a lot like corporate, not personal, computing. Tesler had been captivated by Kay’s Dynabook idea, but there was no budget for more people to work with him. Kay suggested that he might be able to work part-time with

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Brand’s article and at SAIL see also LSD Durkee, Steve Duvall, Ann Weinberg Duvall, Bill antiwar demonstrations and ARPAnet and Paradam Conference and Dymax Dynabook Earnest, Les drug use and electronic “presence” and FBI investigation of sauna and spell-checking program of Earth Day e-commerce Electric Kool-Aid Acid

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at SAIL Johniac Johnson, Clifton Johnson, Huey Johnson, Lyndon Jones, Chris Joplin, Janis JOSS journal, electronic Kaehler, Ted Kay, Alan Alto and display transducer of Dynabook of Flex and Learning Research Group of Minicom of Moore and at SAIL Tesler and at Xerox PARC Kepler’s bookstore Kerouac, Jack Kesey, Faye

Computer: A History of the Information Machine

by Martin Campbell-Kelly and Nathan Ensmenger · 29 Jul 2013 · 528pp · 146,459 words

thesis. Kay’s research was focused on a device, which he then called the Reactive Engine but later called the Dynabook, that would fulfill the personal-information needs of an individual. The Dynabook was to be a personal-information system, the size of a notebook, that would replace ordinary printed media. By

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using computer technology the Dynabook would store vast amounts of information, provide access to databases, and incorporate sophisticated information-finding tools. Of course, the system that Kay came up with

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for his PhD program was far removed from the utopian Dynabook. Nonetheless, at the end of the 1960s, Engelbart’s electronic office and Kay’s Dynabook concept were “the two threads” that led to the modern graphical user interface. What held back the practical

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-inch sheet of “paper.” Unlike ordinary terminals, it displayed documents to look like typeset pages incorporating graphical images—exactly as Kay had envisaged in the Dynabook. The Alto had a mouse, as envisaged by Engelbart, and the now-familiar desktop environment of icons, folders, and documents. In short, the system was

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mobile. In 1968 Alan Kay first conceptualized the notion of a portable computer, ideas formalized as the “Dynabook” concept at Xerox PARC in 1972. That year, many user-friendly elements of Kay’s Dynabook were incorporated into the Xerox Alto workstation, but easy mobility was not one of them. A decade later

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, Jack, 303 DOS operating system, 179, 257 See also MS-DOS operating system Dot-com crash, 295 “Draft Report on the EDVAC” (von Neumann), 83 Dynabook personal information system, 259, 260, 296 E. Remington and Sons, 23 Eckert, John Presper data-processing computers and, 99–103 engineering insight of, 70–71

The One Device: The Secret History of the iPhone

by Brian Merchant · 19 Jun 2017 · 416pp · 129,308 words

you look at the Newspad in 2001, I mean, that’s an iPad.” Around the same time, Alan Kay designed the first mobile computer, the Dynabook: “A combination of this ‘carry anywhere’ device and a global information utility, such as ARPA network or two-way cable TV, will bring the libraries

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learning and creativity. It took imagination like his to drive the computer into the public’s hands. The finest distillation of that imagination was the Dynabook, one of the most enduring conceptual artifacts of Silicon Valley—a handheld computer that was powerful, dynamic, and easy enough to operate that children could

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materials, poems, letters, recipes, records, drawings, animations, musical scores, waveforms, dynamic simulations, and anything else you would like to remember and change.” Some of the Dynabook’s specs should sound familiar. “There should be no discernible pause between cause and effect. One of the metaphors we used when designing such a

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musical instrument, such as a flute, which is owned by its user and responds instantly and consistently to its owner’s wishes,” they wrote. The Dynabook, which looks like an iPad with a hard keyboard, was one of the first mobile-computer concepts ever put forward, and perhaps the most influential

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in the 1960s and ’70s. Kay believes nothing has yet been produced—including the iPhone and the iPad—that fulfills the original aims of the Dynabook. Steve Jobs always admired Kay, who had famously told Newsweek in 1984 that the Mac was the “first computer worth criticizing.” In the 1980s, just

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before he was fired from his first stint at Apple, Jobs had been pushing an effort to get the Dynabook built. Jobs and Kay talked on the phone every couple of months until Steve’s passing, and Jobs invited him to the unveiling of the

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a stylish public library. Old media, indeed. We’ve spent the last couple of hours discussing new media, the sort that flickers by on our Dynabook-inspired devices in a barrage of links, clips, and ads. The kind that Alan Kay fears, as did his late friend the scholar and critic

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is talking about is more a philosophical problem than a hardware problem. He says we have the technological capacity, the ability, to create a true Dynabook right now, but the demands of consumerism—specifically as marshaled by tech companies’ marketing departments—have turned our most mobile computers into, fittingly, consumption devices

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Sculley–era Apple. It depicts a professor in an opulent, Ivy League–looking office consulting his tablet (even now, Gruber refers to it as a Dynabook, and Alan Kay was apparently a consultant on the Knowledge Navigator project) by speaking to it. His computer is represented by a bow-tie-wearing