Dynabook

Dealers of Lightning
by Michael A. Hiltzik
Published 27 Apr 2000

Since there was no room for an assembly line on Coyote Hill, Ornstein rented another building about a mile away on Hanover Street, which became known as the “Garage.” The CSL engineers’ 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 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 school. The idea was doubly ingenious: It not only gave them a paradigm to shoot for, but also established the machine’s physical dimensions.

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“The thing had to fit in a reasonable sized box and it couldn’t cost too much,” said Lampson. “Small and simple was critical, because the whole point of it was to have one 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 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 about Jerry?” he asked glumly. Elkind still controlled the CSL budget. Lampson and Thacker had both been present the day he shot down the miniCom.

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She viewed the agency as a traditional Xerox paying customer of the sort that routinely 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 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 day of the agency demo he came to work wearing a trenchcoat, dark glasses, and a fedora pulled down over his brow.

Insanely Great: The Life and Times of Macintosh, the Computer That Changed Everything
by Steven Levy
Published 2 Feb 1994

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 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. 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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Everyone in the industry knows what a Dynabook is, and regards it as a sort of technological bull's-eye to aim for. 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 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 techniques and innovations in the process. The real product is the body of ideas that circulate from the vision. Kay himself has conceded that technological wizards generally fall into two categories: the Michelangelo types who dream of Sistine Chapels and then actually spend years building them, and the da Vincis, who have a million ideas but seldom finish anything themselves.

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In this bifurcation, of course, Kay was the ultimate da Vinci. 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 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 make them simpler to use.

Tools for Thought: The History and Future of Mind-Expanding Technology
by Howard Rheingold
Published 14 May 2000

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 machines, to the Ethernet local-area-network team who worked to link the units, was motivated by the burning desire to get a 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" that would breathe computational life into the hardware, once the hardware wizards downstairs cooked up a small network of prototype personal computers.

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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 Goldberg, "can be thought of as different sensory views of dynamic processes. The structural similarities among them are apparent in Smalltalk, which provides a 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."

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Once an individual or a society decides that education is essential, 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 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 an animated fingerpaint set and a synthesized orchestra.

Machines of Loving Grace: The Quest for Common Ground Between Humans and Robots
by John Markoff
Published 24 Aug 2015

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 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 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 the Architecture Machine Group at MIT in 1967, in part inspired by the ideas of Ivan Sutherland, whose “Sketchpad” Ph.D. thesis was a seminal work in both computer graphics and interface design.

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He thought 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 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 had a very different view of the role of computing, and his tenure at SAIL felt like working in the enemy’s camp.

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Broad, “Computer Scientists Stymied in Their Quest to Match Human Vision,” New York Times, September 25, 1984, http://www.nytimes.com/1984/09/25/science/computer-scientists-stymied-in-their-quest-to-match-human-vision.html. 26.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 York: Oxford University Press, 2012), 2. 29.John Markoff, “John McCarthy, 84, Dies; Computer Design Pioneer,” New York Times, http://www.nytimes.com/2011/10/26/science/26mccarthy.html?

What the Dormouse Said: How the Sixties Counterculture Shaped the Personal Computer Industry
by John Markoff
Published 1 Jan 2005

Computers until then were hulking behemoths deemed useful for large organizational tasks, ranging from check processing to calculating missile trajectories. Doug Engelbart realized that computing could be more than data processing. Previously, teams of humans had served a 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 enduring touchstones of Silicon Valley, and it was born in Doug Engelbart’s search for ways to elevate the power of the human mind. In the 1962 report, he also described a writing machine that would dramatically alter the process of working with ideas.

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asked Kay.2 Although he was a novice at the skills required for corporate infighting, for Kay coming to PARC was like opening a dam. Unhappy at SAIL, by 1971 he was preparing to head off to Carnegie Mellon University, 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 director, Larry Roberts, had put him in charge of the idea of a “Super AI” computer for the ARPAnet. It had been one of Roberts’s and Bob Taylor’s schemes to create “magnets” that would attract people to use the new network.

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It had been one of Roberts’s and Bob Taylor’s schemes to create “magnets” that would attract people to use the new network. The idea flourished in 1970 and 1971, and as a result, even while he was a postdoctoral researcher at SAIL, Kay was 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. He accepted their offer sometime late in 1970, soon after he had begun consulting for Bob Taylor, who was just beginning to build PARC. When it came time to leave, however, Kay changed his mind.

The Innovators: How a Group of Inventors, Hackers, Geniuses and Geeks Created the Digital Revolution
by Walter Isaacson
Published 6 Oct 2014

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 their eyes when they heard about the notebook computer idea,” 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 take the first step toward realizing the Dynabook, Kay proposed an “interim” machine.

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“It’s a place where you can still be an artisan,” he told 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 raise expectations among hard-core engineers. “I figured that Smalltalk 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 kid could take it wherever he goes to hide,” with a programming language that was user-friendly.

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“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’s seminal insight about how computers could be used for creative tasks: “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 collaboration.

Bootstrapping: Douglas Engelbart, Coevolution, and the Origins of Personal Computing (Writing Science)
by Thierry Bardini
Published 1 Dec 2000

But the idea was permanently in Kay'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 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 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 representation of the machine corresponding to the negotiations and interests of all these new acfors in the game.

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My response was that everyone had agreed for years that cathode-ray tube technology was too bulky and heavy, too expenSIve to build, and too extravagant in requirements for electric power. But untIl we had a really 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 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 representation: "It would be nearly as powerful as the leading commercial minicomputer, include a remarkably rich display monitor, reside in a network of distributed machines, and, most important, be inexpensive enough for everyone to have his very own com- puter" (quoted in Smith and Alexander 1988, 85).

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It was principally the product of the vision of one man, Alan Kay. The Alto took Douglas Engelbart's innovations in a direction completely different from that envisioned by the Framework for the 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 mathematics and in 1966 was admit- ted to the recently formed University of Utah graduate program in computer science. By 1969, Kay had both his Master's and Ph.D. from the University of Utah and an appointment as associate professor in the school's computer sci- ence department.

The One Device: The Secret History of the iPhone
by Brian Merchant
Published 19 Jun 2017

“Suppose it had enough power to outrace your senses of sight and hearing, enough capacity to store for later retrieval thousands of page-equivalents of reference 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 system was that of a 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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I’d headed to Kay’s home to ask the godfather of the mobile computer how the iPhone and a world where two billion people owned smartphones compared to what he had envisioned 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 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 iPhone in January 2007. “He handed it to me afterwards and said, ‘What do you think, Alan—is it worth criticizing?’

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The second is 2001: A Space Odyssey, which featured a device called a Newspad. “I think 2001 is the most mainstream representation of an iPhone- or iPad-size device in the late sixties,” Novak says, “if 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 and schools (not to mention stores and billboards) of the world to the home.” Computers and cell phones would develop on separate tracks for the next half a century—researchers made smaller, faster, more multifunctional phones and computers until eventually they both were small enough to be smashed together.

The Secret War Between Downloading and Uploading: Tales of the Computer as Culture Machine
by Peter Lunenfeld
Published 31 Mar 2011

From a memo he wrote in 1971 to Xerox, available at <http://www.artmuseum.net/w2vr/archives/Kay/ 01_Dynabook.html>: “Though the Dynabook will have considerable local storage and will do most computing locally, it will spend a large percentage of its time hooked to various large, global information utilities which will permit communication with others of ideas, data, working models, as well as the daily chit-chat that organizations need in order to function. The communications link will be by private and public wires and by packet radio. Dynabooks will also be used as servers in the information utilities. They will have enough power to be entirely shaped by software.” 18 .

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The tension between the “suits” in the corporate suites on the East Coast and the techs in their experimental labs on the West Coast was a key conflict in the Aquarian period, and the legacy of those battles continues to animate the discourses of Silicon Valley to this day. Even if Kay had not accomplished all of this, he would be remembered for creating the concept of “personal dynamic media.” Kay and a team at PARC created a conceptual prototype they called the “Dynabook,” and set a mark for all the laptops, personal computer tablets, and mobile computing devices to come. Kay foresaw the integration of digital modes of creativity into every aspect of human life from the earliest learning experiences to the most advanced scientific experiments.17 He was like a number of other brilliant scientists involved in the Aquarian moment who looked to children to find inspiration, and drew from the pioneering work of Swiss developmental psychologist and pedagogical theorist Jean Piaget.18 These computer scientists created what I have come to call a “kinderkult.”

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., 9 Difference engine, 149 Digg, 34 Digital Equipment Corporation (DEC), 71, 149, 153, 163, 170 Digital video discs (DVDs), 2, 7–8, 15, 58 Digital video recorders (DVRs), 2, 7, 15, 23, 181n3 Disco, 63 Disney Concert Hall, 39 DIY (do-it-yourself) movements, 67–70 203 Dot-com bubble, 79, 145, 174 Doubleclick, 177 Downloading, xiii–xiv, 180nn1,2 animal kingdom and, 1 bespoke futures and, 97, 123, 132, 138 best use and, 13–14 commercial networks and, 4–5 communication devices and, 15–16 cultural hierarchy of, 1–2 culture machine and, 143, 168 dangers of overabundance and, 7–10 defined, 1 diabetic responses to, 3–5 disrupting flow and, 23–24 figure/ground and, xvi, 42–43, 46, 102 Freedom software and, 22–23 habits of mind and, 9–10 humans and, 1–2 information overload and, 22, 149 info-triage and, xvi, 20–23, 121, 132, 143 as intake, 5 mindfulness and, xvi, 14, 17, 20–24, 27–29, 42, 77, 79, 123, 129, 183n6 patio potato and, 9–10, 13 peer-to-peer networks and, 15, 54, 92, 116, 126 stickiness and, 13–17, 20–23, 27–29, 184n15 surfing and, 20, 80, 180n2 television and, 2 unimodernism and, 41–42, 49, 54–57, 66–67, 76–77 viral distribution and, 30, 56, 169 wants vs. needs and, 13, 37, 57 Web n.0 and, 79, 82–83, 86–87 Duchamp, Marcel, 44, 48, 94 Dymaxion map, 73 Dynabook, 161–162, 196n17 Dynamic equilibrium, 117–120 EBay, 68 Eckert, J. Presper, 148 INDEX Efficiency, 21–24, 98, 103 8 Man (Hirai and Kuwata), 108 8–track tapes, 2 89/11, xvi, 97, 100–102, 105, 130 Einstein, Albert, 49–50, 186n4 Eisenstein, Sergei, 31 52, 88 El Lissitzky, 45 Eminent Victorians (Strachey), 19 End of History, The (Fukayama), 97 Engelbart, Douglas, 144, 157–167 ENIAC computer, 148 Enlightenment Electrified, xvi, 47 bespoke futures and, 129–139 determinism and, 131–132 Nietzschean self-satisfaction and, 132 religion and, 130–135, 138 secular culture and, 133–134 technology and, 131–133, 136–139 Entrepreneurs, 99, 109, 156–157, 174 Environmental impact reports (EIRs), 79–80 Ethernet, 161 Etsy.com, 68 Evans, Walker, 41–42 Everyone Is a Designer!

The Dream Machine: J.C.R. Licklider and the Revolution That Made Computing Personal
by M. Mitchell Waldrop
Published 14 Apr 2001

And by all accounts the wildest of the bunch was Utah's Alan Kay, a guy who was so far out in the future that not even this crowd could take him seriously-yet so funny, so glib, 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 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 do it. And it would have lots and lots of storage inside-maybe even a hard disk!

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Not a personal dynamic vehicle, as in Engelbart's metaphor. . . but something much more 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 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 of it to see what it would look and feel like, and poured in lead pel- ::- To Engelbart, the difference between the batch-processing mainframes sold by IBM and the kind of interactive, "personal" computing that he was after (via time-sharing) was the differ- ence between railroads and the private automobile.

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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 first tiny step. (Or maybe not so tiny; Kay's "self-portrait" drawing of the FLEX, circa 1968, looks like a slightly overweight version of the Apple II microcomputer that would debut a decade later.) But no matter. Once Kay had completed his 1968 master's thesis and his 1969 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.

Fire in the Valley: The Birth and Death of the Personal Computer
by Michael Swaine and Paul Freiberger
Published 19 Oct 2014

Although the GRiD Compass inspired an entire industry of laptop computers and its magnesium case was an idea that Steve Jobs picked up on at NeXT, the GRiD machine was no Dynabook. In particular, it used a keyboard for input. But if you could use the screen for input as well as output, you could immediately eliminate half the bulk of the device. A number of companies moved the idea forward over the years. But while these companies pushed the technology for Dynabook-like devices, many of them were designed to be computers. Part of the genius of the Dynabook, though, was that it didn’t necessarily aspire to that. It was something new—something that didn’t yet exist.

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At an offsite meeting for the Mac team, the one where he told them that “real artists ship” and “it’s more fun to be a pirate than to join the Navy,” he also challenged the Mac team to do a “Mac in a book by 1985.” In a book? Apple would later produce portables called MacBooks, but Jobs wasn’t talking about a portable computer. What he was really talking about was Alan Kay’s Dynabook. Kay, a Xerox PARC legend, had conceived of the Dynabook years earlier. It was in effect the prototype for every tablet device since created. It was a thin, flat display. Viewing it, you felt like you were reading from a piece of paper rather than a screen. It had no physical keyboard. It was a ubiquitous information and communication device that wasn’t necessarily a computer.

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Delivering the Tablets Jobs hadn’t forgotten the Mac-in-a-book dream, though. And he wasn’t alone. Technology companies had been exploring the Dynabook concept for 20 years, since well before Jobs said anything to the Mac team about a Mac in a book. The concept required several innovations: flat-panel displays, the display as input device, and advances to get the machines small enough to carry. Back in January 1979, inspired by the Dynabook, Xerox PARC researcher John Ellenby left to start a company with friends Glenn Edens, Dave Paulsen, and Bill Moggridge. Working without publicity, they delivered a computer, the GRiD Compass, in 1981—the same year IBM introduced its PC.

Computer: A History of the Information Machine
by Martin Campbell-Kelly and Nathan Ensmenger
Published 29 Jul 2013

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 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 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.

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More recently, Google has also been an important participant in open-source mobile platforms that are transforming computing. GOING MOBILE From shortly after the advent of personal computing, computers have become increasingly 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, in 1982, GRiD Systems Corporation launched the GRiD Compass 1101, arguably the first laptop computer. Though it lacked compatibility with existing platforms and cost roughly $8,000, it succeeded in the price-insensitive military and aerospace markets.

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In the course of developing the Alto, Xerox PARC evolved the graphical user interface, which became “the preferred style in the 1980s just as time-sharing was the preferred style of the 1970s.” The Alto computer was designed as a desktop computer with a specially constructed monitor that could display an 8½ × 11-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 all one would now expect from a Macintosh or a Windows-based IBM-compatible PC. However, all this was taking place in 1975, before the advent of personal computers, when “it was hard for people to believe that an entire computer” could be “required to meet the needs of one person.”

Move Fast and Break Things: How Facebook, Google, and Amazon Cornered Culture and Undermined Democracy
by Jonathan Taplin
Published 17 Apr 2017

As Brown notes, “Decentralization was fundamental to ARPANET in the sense that a nuclear strike on a single city could not bring down the entire network.” Everything done at PARC, from the Alto to Bob Metcalf’s Ethernet architecture, was geared to making a decentralized network of personal computers function efficiently. This was new. The second core principle flowed from Alan Kay’s Dynabook. As Brown says, “The Dynabook and then the Alto were inspirations meant to empower the artistic individual.” When Brown first started working with Kay, he was playing music on the Alto and working with Stanford’s Center for Computer Research in Music and Acoustics. These two innovations—a decentralized network and a personal creativity machine—became the core of the Internet revolution.

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And while he proclaimed that this revolution was the best news “since psychedelics,” he was fully aware that PARC was filled with video-gaming freaks financed by the Pentagon. The image makers at Xerox headquarters back East practically had a heart attack and decreed that there should be no more reporters at PARC. But Alan Kay—the young team leader who had envisioned the Dynabook, the first iteration of a PC, while he was still a PhD candidate—didn’t care. They were proud to fly their freak flag at PARC. Kay’s real passion was to design an educational tool using Engelbart’s basic ideas but putting an enhanced emphasis on the graphical user interface (GUI). Despite resistance from some of PARC’s management, Kay managed to assemble a small team to build the Alto—the first real personal computer.

Valley of Genius: The Uncensored History of Silicon Valley (As Told by the Hackers, Founders, and Freaks Who Made It Boom)
by Adam Fisher
Published 9 Jul 2018

Alan Kay loved it. And so Alan Kay, PARC’s software theorist, got together with PARC’s resident hardware wizards, Butler Lampson and Chuck Thacker. Together they created the Alto. Chuck Thacker: For a while we actually called the Alto the Interim Dynabook, because it allowed Alan to do a lot of the software things that he wanted to do on the Dynabook. And so he actually paid for the first twelve machines or something like that. Terry Winograd: With a lot of this stuff at PARC, Alan had the vision, and the tech guys like Butler Lampson and Chuck Thacker actually did it. Alan Kay: Chuck basically designed the whole Alto from start to finish in just a little over three months.

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They thought Rolling Stone was a rag magazine of degenerated hippies and would have nothing to do with them and didn’t want Rolling Stone to have anything to do with Xerox. Alan Kay: And so Xerox went batshit when they saw it. Stewart Brand (writing in Rolling Stone): Alan Kay is designing a handheld stand-alone interactive-graphic computer (about the size, shape, and diversity of a Whole Earth Catalog, electric) called “Dynabook.” It’s mostly high-resolution display screen, with a keyboard on the lower third, and various cassette-loading slots, optional hookup plugs, etc. And that is the general bent of research at Xerox, soft, away from hugeness and centrality, toward the small and personal, toward putting maximum computer power in the hands of every individual who wants it.

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And finally we did, and one of the things we realized was that if you wanted to communicate with it, it kind of had to be personal. Bob Metcalfe: Can you imagine that? A computer on every desk? Wow. Very controversial in 1973. Why would you want a computer on your desk? What possible use could there be for such a thing? I remember people had that discussion. Charles Simonyi: Alan Kay had a clear vision of the Dynabook, and he was talking about it all the time. Alvy Ray Smith: His idea was that the computer should be simple enough that a kid could use it. He saw it all. He was very clear about it. Alan Kay: Because of my experience with Seymour Papert I got converted from thinking about computers as tools for adults to thinking about them as media, like reading and writing.

Samsung Rising: The Inside Story of the South Korean Giant That Set Out to Beat Apple and Conquer Tech
by Geoffrey Cain
Published 15 Mar 2020

He was on a bold and prescient mission: to build a tablet computer, a full twenty-seven years before the introduction of the iPad, for his start-up company, Apple Computer. “Steve knew the future was mobile. He was looking to build a Dynabook,” said his colleague Jay Elliot, who accompanied him on the trip, as well as on subsequent Samsung visits. “He needed a supplier of memory and displays.” Skeptics were calling the Dynabook tablet concept, created by Xerox, a distant and fanciful idea. It resembled a prop in the movie 2001: A Space Odyssey. It was thought to be too expensive to get to market and too small a niche in the marketplace.

…

Kay, “A Personal Computer for Children of All Ages,” Xerox Palo Alto Research Center, 1972, http://www.vpri.org/​pdf/​hc_pers_comp_for_children.pdf. But that didn’t deter Jobs: Alan Kay, “American Computer Pioneer Alan Kay’s Concept, the Dynabook, Was Published in 1972. How Come Steve Jobs and Apple iPad Get the Credit for Tablet Invention?” Quora, April 21, 2019, https://www.quora.com/​American-computer-pioneer-Alan-Kay-s-concept-the-Dynabook-was-published-in-1972-How-come-Steve-Jobs-and-Apple-iPad-get-the-credit-for-tablet-invention/​answer/​Alan-Kay-11. would need to be portable: Jay Elliot, interview by the author, January 9, 2014.

Intertwingled: The Work and Influence of Ted Nelson (History of Computing)
by Douglas R. Dechow
Published 2 Jul 2015

The Grail Gesture Recognition System on a tablet that was invented the same year as the mouse—1964—and the conventions of making arrows, windows, and so on, including moving and resizing them. All of this was happening at that time: Seymour Papert with his Logo programming language and Turtle graphics; Simula; and some of our own stuff as well, such as the Arpanet, the Flex Machine and its first object-oriented operating system, the idea of Dynabook, and much, much more. It was an exciting time. The Whole Earth Catalog and its folks were nearby in Menlo Park thinking big thoughts about universal access to tools. Not just physical, but especially mental. This was the first book in the PARC library, and it had a big influence on how we thought things should be.

…

This is very much not the same thing as thinking mathematically, or thinking like a computer scientist. Luckily, there is a tradition of work that takes media and literacy more seriously. The Smalltalk programming language was developed in the 1970s by Alan Kay, Dan Ingalls, Adele Goldberg, and others [6]. Together with the vision of the Dynabook personal computer, it presented an approach to computing that focused on reading and writing (that is to say, computational literacy) and the creation of media and media-making tools (including simulations). And a number of the descendants of Smalltalk and Logo are concerned with media-making and broadening literacy, such as the Processing language for artists and designers, the Scratch language that uses snap-together tiles, and the games-focused Kodu language [7, 13, 14].

One Click: Jeff Bezos and the Rise of Amazon.com
by Richard L. Brandt
Published 27 Oct 2011

One likely scenario is that he was testing the idea of paying for access to digital books while the Kindle was being tested. Amazon was not the first company to offer electronic books. In fact, people had been toying with the idea for decades before the Kindle arrived. In 1968, Alan Kay, then at Xerox Corporation’s Palo Alto Research Center, conceived of the Dynabook, a graphics-based portable computer (a concept which Steve Jobs later borrowed to create the Macintosh). But Kay also saw the device as an e-book, a way to download and carry around digitized books. That meant people would have to have access to digitized books. So in 1971, Michael Hart, a student at the University of Illinois, Champaign-Urbana (where the Mosaic Web browser was later invented), started Project Gutenberg, the first project to digitize and archive written works, mostly books in the public domain.

…

Dillon, Eric Discounted books and Amazon impact on book industry, Disney, Walt Distributors drop-shipping and early Amazon online business, failure of of wholesale books See also Warehouses and distribution Doerr, John Dot-com companies. See Internet companies DREAM Institute Drugstore.com DVDs, Amazon sale of Dynabook Early adopters E-bay, versus Amazon Auctions E-books agency model and Amazon. see Kindle devices, competitive early readers free future view for Google market, growth of pricing of Edison, Thomas E Ink Corporation Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2) Electronics Ellison, Larry Employees Bezos interaction with compensation and cult of Amazon expansion (1998) firing (2000) hiring practices individualistic “Just Do It” award two-pizza teams Wal-Mart executives, hiring of work environment Endurance (Lansing) E-Niche Equinet Erwise Everybook Express Lane Farsight Financial status cost-cutting decline (2000) first investors growth versus profits strategy investment advisors IPO, Amazon leverage, Bezos approach to losses and debt (1999) pro forma net profit (2002) raising capital, problems of recovery of Amazon revenues in 2010, share price, growth rate stock downgraded valuations of Amazon, initial Web site building, profitability of Fitel, Bezos at Food and grocery items Fortune Frederick, Robert Free Software Foundation Frisbee Frox, Inc.

From Counterculture to Cyberculture: Stewart Brand, the Whole Earth Network, and the Rise of Digital Utopianism
by Fred Turner
Published 31 Aug 2006

Taylor in turn recruited Bill English and a dozen other members of Engelbart’s ARC group, hoping that they would bring their understanding of the NLS with them.18 Along with members of the ARC team, Taylor recruited a number of talented young programmers and engineers whom he had met in a series of graduate student symposia sponsored by ARPA. One of the most prominent of these was Alan Kay. In 1969 Kay’s PhD dissertation at the University of Utah had described an interactive desktop computer; as early as 1967, Kay had proposed a portable variation on that computer that he called the Dynabook. Kay’s Dynabook would soon provide a guiding vision for Xerox PARC’s pursuit of its own individualized computer, the Alto. Within the various teams concerned with developing the Alto, two communities emerged. One group, based in PARC’s Computer Science Laboratory and including designers Butler Lampson and Charles Thacker, focused on developing the architecture of the Alto and the Ethernet and on pushing the limits of computer design.

…

The Spacewarriors themselves were “out of their bodies” in the game, not unlike high-tech versions of the turned-on dancers of the Trips Festival.28 In Brand’s rhetoric, the Spacewarriors of the AI Lab became countercultural pioneers. And they were not the only ones. Leaving the stuffy Stanford basement, Brand took his readers to Xerox PARC, where he introduced Tak i n g t h e W h o l e E a r t h D i g i t a l [ 117 ] them to Alan Kay and his Dynabook, and to the ARPANET as well. He then traveled to the offices of Resource One, where he presented the group’s founder, Pam Hart. Both PARC and Resource One, he suggested, hoped to take computers out of their military, industrial, and academic contexts and turn them into tools for individuals to use as they saw fit.

…

.), 222, 228 –30, 232 Dalton, Richard, 131 Dataglove, 165 [ 317 ] Dawkins, Richard, 196 “Dead Heads,” 143, 166 – 67 de Chardin, Pierre Teilhard, 165 de Geus, Arie, 181, 182 Dell, 212 deregulation: of international markets, 233; of telecommunications and computing industries, 215, 216, 230 desktop computers, 105, 212, 237, 247 Dial ( journal), 55 “digerati,” 260, 290n24 Digital Equipment Corporation (DEC), 28, 105, 133, 134 digital free speech, 172 Digital Generation, 207 digital technology, link to hallucinogens, 163 – 65 digital utopianism, 33 Dine, Jim, 48 disembodiment, seen as a route to a more holistic life, 16 distributed learning, 183 Domebook One (Kahn), 94 Domebook Two (Kahn), 94 dot-com bubble, 88, 236, 237 Douglas, Mary, 130 downsizing, 216 Dr. Dobb’s Journal of Tiny BASIC Calisthenics and Orthodontia, 113 Draper, Hal, 12 Draper, John, 168 Draper, Ted, 136 Drop City, 74 –76, 94, 96, 119, 256 Droppings, 75 Durkee, Barbara, 75 Durkee, Steve, 46, 48, 50, 51, 75, 81, 97, 109 Dymax, 113 Dymaxion car, 55 Dynabook, 111, 117 Dyson, Esther, 88; chairman of ICANN, 227; and EFF, 218, 219, 220, 227; and Gingrich, 215, 219, 231–32; integration into Whole Earth network, 227; longing to return to an egalitarian world, 248; “Magna Carta for the Knowledge Age,” 228 –30; and PFF conferences, 227, 230; profile of, 226 –27; Release 2.0: A Design for Living in the Digital Age, 14; vision of Internet, 3, 16; and Wired, 222; work in Whole Earth Review, 195 Dyson, Freeman, 88, 226 [ 318 ] Index East-West bookstore, 70 ecology, as alternative politics, 43 – 45 Ecology Center, 110 e-commerce, 214 economic production, knowledge-based mode of, 240 – 42 ecosystems in nature, 203 Edwards, Paul, 17, 186 Ehrlich, Paul, 50; and coevolution, 121; population biology, 45; The Population Bomb, 43, 120; preoccupation with systems-oriented models, 44; The Process of Evolution, 44 Einstein, Albert, 122 Eisner, Michael, 211 Electric Word, 211 electronic fraud, 170 “electronic frontier,” 142, 172 Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF), 7, 156, 172, 218, 219, 220, 227, 286n27 Electronic Information Exchange System (EIES), 129, 130, 131 electronics industry, dependent on network patterns of organization, 149 Ellul, Jacques, The Technological Society, 29 Emerson, Ralph Waldo, 55 Engelbart, Douglas, 274n10; connections to various elements of the counterculture, 109; and Global Business Network, 189; philosophy of “bootstrapping,” 108; role in the development of the ARPANET, 274n12; understanding of the social potential of computers, 107– 8; work at Augmentation Research Center, 61, 106 English, Bill, 109, 111, 120, 274n12 Erewhon Trading Company, 185 Erhard, Werner, 109 Erhard Seminar Training (EST) movement, 109 Esalen Institute, 182 Essential Whole Earth Catalog, 131 Ethernet, 111 Evans, Dave, 81, 97, 101, 109 –10, 110 Explorations ( journal), 53 Fadiman, Jim, 61 Fairchild Semiconductor, 150 Farallones Institute, 70 Farm, the, 147, 159, 277n14 Fast Company (magazine), 207 FBI, 170 Feigelson, Naomi, 49, 50 Felsenstein, Lee: forum on hacking on the WELL, 168 –70; on Hackers’ Conference, 137; and hacking community, 135; and the Homebrew Computer Club, 115; proselytizer for early computers, 133; and public peer-to-peer computing, 115; and the Tom Swift Terminal, 115; and Whole Earth Catalog, 114, 246 feminism, rise of, 152 Figallo, Cliff, 146, 147, 148, 277n1 Fisher, Scott, 163 flexible factory, 216 Fluegelman, Andrew, 137 Forrester, Jay, 27, 185 fractal formations, 203 Frank, Robert, 96 Frank, Thomas, 215 Freedom Conspiracy, 210 Free Speech Movement, 1–2, 11–13, 16, 17, 31, 34, 35, 63, 240, 242 – 43 Free University, 70 freeware, 137 French, Gordon, 102, 115 Fuller, Buckminster, 55 –56; Comprehensive Designer, 56 –57, 58, 244; Dymaxion principle, 113; geodesic dome, 65, 94; Ideas and Integrities, 56, 57, 83; imprint of cold war– era military-industrial information theory on, 58; key influence on Whole Earth community, 4, 43, 49, 80, 82, 89, 243; notion of the world as an information system, 57–58; “outlaw area,” 88; “pattern-complex,” 67, 256 Fuller, Margaret, 55 Galbraith, John Kenneth, The New Industrial State, 29 Galison, Peter, 19, 72, 264n27 game theory, 264n28, 265n43 Gans, David, 143, 166 Garcia, Jerry, 61, 66, 166 Gardner, Hugh, 119, 267n70 Garreau, Joel, 189 –90, 221 Gaskin, Stephen, 147 Gates, Bill, 7, 208 Gateway, 212 GEnie, 144 geodesic dome, 55, 65, 94 –96, 125 Ghamari-Tabrizi, Sharon, 186 Gibson, William, 164, 172, 195; Neuromancer, 162 – 63, 281n58 Index gift economy, 157–58, 279n42, 279n43 Gilder, George, 8; Bronson’s profile of, 225 –26; on the cover of Wired, 225; and deregulation, 208, 215, 216; interview with Kelly, 223 –25, 226; “Magna Carta for the Knowledge Age,” 228 –30; and Progress and Freedom Foundation, 227; promoter of telecommunications stocks, 224; relationship with Wired, 223; and Wired, 222 Gilmore, John, 172 Gingrich, Newt, 8; Contract with America, 231– 32; on the counterculture, 288n53; and deregulation, 208, 215, 216, 230, 287n49; and Dyson, 227; and Wired, 222, 223 Ginsberg, Allen, 62, 168 Gitlin, Todd, 32, 35, 119, 209; The Whole World Is Watching, 253 Gleick, James, 196 Global Business Network (GBN), 6, 7; blending of countercultural and techno-cultural organizational styles, 181– 82, 184, 248; building of, 181–94; clients of, 176; corporation as a site of revolutionary social change, 194; Garreau’s view of, 221; included former leaders of the cold war military-industrial complex, 188; lack of diversity at, 189; Learning Conferences as basis of, 181– 84; “Learning Journeys,” 190; linked formation of interpersonal networks and the modeling of network systems, 187– 88; members engaged in interpersonal and for-profit forms of interaction simultaneously, 189 – 90; metaphor of the network, 184, 189, 194; “network members,” 189; Rio Chama journey, 191–92; scenario-building workshops, 187, 192 –94; social affinity as a key element of network coherence, 205; WorldView Meetings, 190 –91 Global Crossing, 224 global marketplace, 216 “global village,” 53 Goffman, Ken (aka R.

Troublemakers: Silicon Valley's Coming of Age
by Leslie Berlin
Published 7 Nov 2017

Kay, handsome and luxuriously mustachioed, was a former professional musician who built a pipe organ in his home and would go on to win a Turing Award, the highest honor for a computer scientist. Kay worked in the systems science lab, but Taylor had recruited him to PARC, and he collaborated closely with Taylor’s group. Kay’s idealized computer—he called it the Dynabook—was as different from the roughly 150,000 computers humming away in the world’s back offices, banks, and universities as the beanbag room was from its executive counterpart.5 In 1972, computers no longer needed to be room-size mainframe behemoths that cost millions of dollars and ran batches of punch-card programs.

…

Not a single machine was sold, despite the apron and cookbook included in the purchase price.7 As things would turn out, even Taylor’s lab—which was stocked with so many bright computer scientists that the president of MIT blamed PARC for causing faculty shortages at the top universities—could not build anything like the notebook-sized Dynabook in 1972.8 What PARC built instead was a machine that would be recognizable today as a personal computer. It had a large monitor, a mouse, menus, a word processing program, and multiple windows. It could compose and edit documents and send them to a printer (also developed at PARC)—and the printout would look like the document laid out on the screen.

…

“Simple machines will give us most of what we want,” and if a number of them were networked together, “almost all jobs that people will be wanting to do in the next ten years could be taken care of.”46 At the next week’s Dealer meeting, Lampson and Alan Kay, who saw Lampson’s proposed computer as an “interim Dynabook”—a first step toward the portable kid-friendly machine he imagined—gave a more detailed talk about “Alan Kay and Butler’s $500 Machine.” The two men laid out a few technical thoughts and invited interested people to a meeting to be held several days later.47 Taylor was thrilled. He had wanted to build a small, easy-to-use machine when the lab had launched eighteen months earlier.

When Things Start to Think
by Neil A. Gershenfeld
Published 15 Feb 1999

The first one was a robot "turtle" that could roll around under control of the computer, moving a pen to make drawings. Infected by the meme of interactive technology for children, Alan Kay carried the idea to the West Coast, to Xerox's Palo Alto Research Center. In the 1970s, he sought to create what he called a Dynabook, a portable personal knowledge navigator shaped like a notebook, a fantasy amplifier. The result was most of the familiar elements of personal computing. Unlike early programming languages that required a specification of a precise sequence of steps to be executed, modern objectoriented languages can express more complex relationships among abstract objects.

…

., 98-99 Copernicus, 113-14 copyrights, 181 Creapole, 55 credit cards: electronic commerce and, 80-81 privacy and use of, 100-1 reflective holograms on, 142 cryptography, 80-81, 156, 207-8 "curse of dimensionality," 164 Daiwa Bank, 77, 86 Darwin, Charles, 125 Data Glove, 49 "Deep Blue," 129-30 "Deep Thought," 129 Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA), 79, 129 derivative~ 78, 85-86 Deutsch, David, 158 Deutsche Telekom, 203 developing countries, 210-11 Dickinson, Becton, 204 Difference Engine, 124-25, 132 digital evolution, 10 digital money, see smart money digital representation, effect of time and use on, 5-6 219 Digital Revolution: disturbance resulting from, 10 promise and reality of, 3, 5 disabled, wearable computers and, 58 discovery, the business of, 169-84 Disney, 203 distance learning, 19 3 distribution of wealth, 78 division of labor between people and machines, 8 DNA molecules, 157 Domus, 55 Doom (computer game), 89 Dynabook, 138 e-broidery, 55 Economist, 115 economy, electronic, 79 education: classroom, 188, 197 departmental organization of, 190-91 distance learning, 193 just-in-time, 192 local learning, 193 at Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) Media Lab, 187-97 use of computers for, 201 Einstein's theory of relativity, 178 electronic books, 15-25, 38, 72 electronic commerce, 80-81, 152, 156 cryptography and, 80-81 paying-as-you-go, 82 electronic funds transfers, 80 electronic ink, 16, 17, 200 universal book and, 18-20 e-mail, 101-2, 104-6 encryption, 80-81 Engelhart, Doug, 139 English Bill of Rights, 98 entanglement, 159 entropy, 175, 176, 177, 188-90 "Entschedidungsproblem," 127 Equifax, 101 220 + Ernst, Richard R.

Whole Earth: The Many Lives of Stewart Brand
by John Markoff
Published 22 Mar 2022

The implication, of course, was that computing was the next thing after LSD—something Ken Kesey had realized several years earlier when Dave Evans introduced him to Engelbart’s NLS computing system. Style aside, the article caught virtually all of the significant trends in computing, ranging from PARC scientist Alan Kay’s Dynabook, which was the archetype of the modern laptop personal computer, to the impact of ARPANET and the fact that a new generation of computer chips, then just on the horizon, would consume far less power, making possible a generation of inexpensive consumer-oriented machines. He also captured the original spirit that would engender the community of hobbyists from which the personal computer industry emerged beginning in 1975.

…

BACK TO NOTE REFERENCE 25 Chapter 7: CoEvolution http://hrlibrary.umn.edu/instree/humanenvironment.html BACK TO NOTE REFERENCE 1 Ross Gelbspan and David Gurin, “Woodstockholm ’72: The Subject Is Survival,” Village Voice, May 11, 1972, 29. BACK TO NOTE REFERENCE 2 The first use of the term was in an advertisement for the Hewlett-Packard 9100A desktop calculator in Science magazine in October of 1968. However, Brand’s use of it in describing Alan Kay’s Dynabook in his 1974 work II Cybernetic Frontiers was the first modern use. The 9100A was programmable but only for numeric applications. BACK TO NOTE REFERENCE 3 Stewart Brand, “SPACEWAR: Fanatic Life and Symbolic Death Among the Computer Bums,” Rolling Stone, December 7, 1972, 33.

…

., 215, 228 Curwen, Darcy, 22, 23 cybernetics, 2, 4, 169, 208, 213, 216–17, 226, 273 Cybernetics (Wiener), 169, 226 cyberspace, 54, 84, 212, 240, 254–55, 258, 261, 279, 298–99 anonymity and pseudonymity in, 266 dangers of, 293, 315 dystopian aspects of, 308, 310–11 gold rush mentality and, 293, 323 impact of, 295–96 SB and, 4, 251–52, 282, 293 see also internet D Dalton, Richard, 261 Daumal, René, 186 Deadheads, 265–66 Defense Department, US, 315, 338 de Geus, Arie, 274, 285, 289 Delattre, Pierre, 47, 74 deserts, SB’s attraction to, 108–10, 114 Desert Solitaire (Abbey), 181 desktop publishing, 164–65 Detroit Free Press, 10, 172–73 Dick Cavett Show, SB’s appearance on, 192 Diehl, Digby, 200 Diggers, 206 Direct Medical Knowledge, 326, 333, 342 DiRuscio, Jim, 324–25 Divine Right’s Trip (Norman), 193, 223 DNA Direct, 343 Dome Cookbook (Baer), 162, 180 Doors of Perception, The (Huxley), 28 dot-com bubble, 296, 326, 333–34, 348 Doubleday, 253, 256, 257 Drop City (commune), 154, 162 “Drugs and the Arts” panel (SUNY Buffalo), 177 Duffy, Frank, 319 Durkee, Aurora, 180 Durkee, Barbara and Stephen, 61, 105, 119–20, 137, 139, 162, 177, 179, 180, 186, 229 Garnerville studio of, 60, 66, 69, 105, 106–7 SB’s friendship with, 51–52, 59–60, 66, 67, 133 in USCO, 106–7 Dvorak, John, 259, 260 Dymax, 147–48 Dynabook, 212 Dyson, Esther, 315, 325 E Eames, Charles, 44–45, 96, 113 Earth, viewed from space: SB’s campaign for photograph of, 134–35, 164 SB’s revelatory vision of, 1, 6, 362 Earth Day (1970), 182, 190, 364 Edson, Joanna, 75–76 Edson, John, 14, 18–20, 38–39, 75 education: intersection of technology and, 144, 145 see also alternative education movement; learning, act of Education Automation (Fuller), 169 Education Innovations Faire, 149 Ehrlich, Paul, 46, 177, 341, 360–61, 364 SB as influenced by, 28, 45, 47, 187, 188, 206, 222–23 EIES (Electronic Information Exchange System), 240, 251–52, 264, 266 Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test, The (Wolfe), 5, 88, 111, 121, 125, 170, 181 “Electric Kool-Aid Management Consultant, The” (Fortune profile of SB), 297 Electronic Frontier Foundation, 325 endangered species, 2, 360–61 Engelbart, Douglas, 83, 138, 146, 151–53, 158, 186–87, 230, 292, 361 “Mother of All Demos” by, 171–72 oNLine System of, 151, 156, 197, 212 SB influenced by, 150, 153, 185, 364 English, Bill, 160, 171, 185, 203, 211 English, Roberta, 160 Eno, Brian, 305, 306, 314, 319, 320, 325, 327, 336, 342, 353, 354 “Environmental Heresies” (Brand), 341–42 environmental movement, 2, 71, 159, 204 activist approach to, 181–82, 187, 188, 201–2, 297, 347 conservation vs. preservation in, 340 SB’s break with, 246, 336, 341, 347 SB’s role in, 4, 9–10, 180, 181–82, 201, 202, 204–7, 284, 347 Esalen Institute, 71–72, 84, 138, 176, 185 Esquire, 88, 146, 183, 247, 250 Essential Whole Earth Catalog, 286 Evans, Dave, 146, 156, 180, 185–87, 212 Exploratorium, 194–98 extinct species, revival of, 359–60 F Fadiman, Jeff, 38, 44, 59, 62–63, 64 Fadiman, Jim, 72–73, 77–78, 80, 84, 89, 97, 98, 101 Fall Joint Computer Conference (San Francisco; 1968), 171–72 Fano, Robert, 46, 273 Fariña, Mimi, 141, 237 Farm (commune), 257 Ferlinghetti, Lawrence, 50, 71 Field, Eric, 44, 53 Fillmore Auditorium (San Francisco), 125–26, 128, 130 filter bubbles, 279, 308 Fluegelman, Andrew, 220, 221–22, 269 Foer, Franklin, 5 Foreign Policy, 356 Fort Benning, SB at, 53–58 Fort Dix, SB at, 58–63, 64, 65–68 Fortune, 297, 339 “Four Changes” (Snyder), 187 Francis, Sharon, 105, 112 Frank, Delbert, 86–87 Frank, Robert, 179, 188, 199–200, 218 Fraunhofer, Joseph Ritter von, 108 Free Speech Movement, 135, 175 From Bauhaus to Our House (Wolfe), 304–5 “Fruits of a Scholar’s Paradise” (Brand; unpublished), 45–46, 208 Fukushima nuclear disaster, 355–58 Fuller, Buckminster, 134, 147, 162, 169, 175, 176, 217 SB influenced by, 132, 138, 146, 150, 168–69, 222, 243–44, 363–64 Fulton, Katherine, 318 futurists, 262, 273 SB as, 258–59, 280, 323 G Gaia hypothesis, 230, 349 games, SB’s interest in, 84, 120, 129–30, 149, 210, 211, 217, 219–21, 236–37 Gandhi, Mohandas K., 53 Garcia, Jerry, 128, 158 Garnerville, N.Y., Durkee/USCO studio at, 60, 66, 69, 105, 106–7, 136, 154 Gaskin, Stephen, 257 Gause, Gregory, 46 GBN, see Global Business Network genetic engineering, 341, 344, 360–61 geodesic domes, 176, 217 Georgia-Pacific, 9, 29 Gerbode Valley, Calif., 219–21, 236–37 Getty Museum, 329 Gibbons, Euell, 138 Gibson, William, 262, 294, 315 Gilman, Nils, 297–98 Gilmore, John, 325, 352 Ginsberg, Allen, 33–34, 50, 69, 77, 94, 177, 237 Global Business Network (GBN), 291, 295–300, 311, 313, 335, 340 Brand and Schwartz as co-founders of, 291–92 climate change scenario of, 338–39 SB consulting position at, 296, 298, 305, 314, 315–16, 323–24, 343, 354 globalization, 295–96, 346 global warming, see climate change GMO foods, 2, 344, 347, 357 Godwin, Mike, 308 Golden Gate National Recreation Area, 237, 360 Gone (Kirkland), 359 Gottlieb, Lou, 140 government, SB’s evolving view of, 166, 227, 348 Graham, Bill, 124, 125, 128, 130–31, 143 Grand Canyon, SB’s visit to, 19–20 Grateful Dead, 24, 123, 125, 126, 130, 131, 141, 158, 160, 189, 265–66 Great Basin National Park, 329–30 “Great Bus Race, The,” SB at, 181 Gregorian, Vartan, 27 Griffin, Susan, 295, 297 Griffith, Saul, 349–50 Gross, Cathleen, 286, 289 Grossman, Henry, 63 H hackers, hacker culture, 25, 84, 147–48, 150, 261, 267, 268–69, 273, 293, 294 SB’s Rolling Stone article on, 46, 211–13, 217, 250 Hackers: Heroes of the Computer Revolution (Levy), 266–67, 268, 270 Hackers Conference, 266–70, 326 Haight-Ashbury (San Francisco neighborhood), 74, 75, 128 Halpern, Sue, 241–42 Harman, Willis, 41, 42, 72, 73, 77, 273 Harner, Michael, 101, 118, 129 Harper’s Magazine, 46, 213, 228 SB’s Bateson profile in, 216–17 Whole Earth Epilog proposal of, 218, 219, 222 Harris, David, 149, 162, 299 Harvey, Brian, 268–69 Hawken, Paul, 247–48, 250, 281, 286, 290, 299, 332, 333, 334 Hayden Planetarium, 91, 92, 105 Hayes, Denis, 351 Healy, Mary Jean, 205, 206, 207 Heard, Gerald, 41–42, 84 Hells Angels, 120 Herbert, Anne, 230–31, 241, 255 Hershey, Hal, 183 Hertsgaard, Mark, 357 Hertzfeld, Andy, 267 Hewlett, William, 156 Hewlett-Packard, 147 Hickel, Walter, 206 Higgins Lake, Mich., Brand family camp at, 7, 8, 9, 10–11, 21, 30, 209, 289–90, 326, 327 Hillis, Danny, 289, 301, 305, 315, 336 Long Now Clock and, 313–14, 316–17, 325–26, 327, 328, 329, 330, 333, 362, 363 Thinking Machines founded by, 279–80, 288 Hippies, Indians, and the Fight for Red Power (Smith), 118 Hoagland, Edward, 201 Hoffer, Eric, 32 Hoffman, Abbie, 177–78, 214, 299 Hog Farm commune, 159, 181, 186, 188, 202, 205, 206, 220 Homebrew Computer Club, 147, 158, 198, 230, 266–67 Homo Ludens (Huizinga), 220 Hopcroft, David, 275 Hopi Indians, 100, 139, 205 Horvitz, Robert, 6 House Committee on Education and Labor, SB at hearing of, 190–91 Household Earth, see Life Forum How Buildings Learn (SB’s UC Berkeley seminar), 302 How Buildings Learn (BBC documentary), 320 How Buildings Learn (Brand), 291, 300–301, 304–7, 310, 312, 317–19, 323, 324, 331 How to Be Rich Well (SB book proposal), 344–46 Hubbard, Al, 42, 77, 273 Huerfano Valley, Colo., 139–40 Huizinga, Johan, 220 human potential movement, 71, 73, 84 humans: freedom of choice of, 42–43 as morally responsible for care of natural world, 42, 347, 349, 360, 361 SB’s speculations about fate of, 38–39 Human Use of Human Beings, The (Wiener), 160 Hunger Show (Life-Raft Earth), 187–88, 189, 203, 263 Huxley, Aldous, 28, 33, 41, 72, 144, 226 hypertext, concept of, 172, 230, 292, 293 I IBM, 91, 92, 96, 108, 211 I Ching, 89–90, 117, 153, 197, 253 Idaho, University of, 21 identity, fake, cyberspace and, 266 II Cybernetic Frontiers (Brand), 46, 213, 217, 221 Iktomi (Ivan Drift), 96–97 Illich, Ivan, 196 Independent, 353 information, personalization of, 279 information sharing, 180 information technology, 299–300, 315 information theory, 273 “Information wants to be free,” 270, 299, 301 information warfare, 315 In Our Time (Hemingway), 11 Institute for International Relations (IIR), 27, 34, 35, 37 Institute for the Future, 315 intelligence augmentation (IA), 83, 185, 187 International Federation of Internal Freedom, 89 International Foundation for Advanced Study, LSD experiments at, 42, 72, 73, 76–82, 273 internet, 146, 151, 279, 293, 314, 316, 326 ARPANET as forerunner of, 212 impact of, 295–96, 323 libertarianism and, 5, 348 see also cyberspace Internet Archive, 330, 332 Internet of Things, 279 Interval Research Corporation, 321–23 “Is Environmentalism Dead?”

Dogfight: How Apple and Google Went to War and Started a Revolution
by Fred Vogelstein
Published 12 Nov 2013

The tablet computer was the most discredited category of consumer electronics in the world. Entrepreneurs had been trying to build tablet computers since before the invention of the PC. They had tried so many times that the conventional wisdom was that it couldn’t be done. Alan Kay, who is to certain geeks what Neil Armstrong is to the space program, drew up plans for the Dynabook in 1968 and laid out those plans in a 1972 paper titled “A Personal Computer for Children of All Ages.” It never got built, though Kay went on to do something arguably even more important. He became one of the inventors of the graphical user interface at Xerox PARC. The first Macintosh and later Microsoft Windows were rooted in Kay’s work.

…

Dadich, Scott Daily Show, The Danger, Inc. Dashboard by Apple Dell Dell, Michael DeSalvo, Chris; iPhone unveiling and desktop computers Diamond v. Diehr DigiCash Digital Equipment Diller, Barry Discovery Channel Disney doctors Doerr, John Doll, Evan Doren, Kevin DoubleClick Duarte, Matias DVDs DVRs Dynabook eBay e-books and -readers; Brightline; iBooks; iPad; Kindle Economist, The, magazine Eisner, Michael Ellison, Larry Emanuel, Ari entertainment industry: Silicon Valley and; see also movies; music; television EO tablet computer ESPN Eustace, Alan Evo 4G by HTC Excite Exxon Facebook; iPhone and Fadell, Tony; Apple joined by; Forstall and; Forstall compared with; iPod and; Jobs and; Nest company of FCC Fiore, Mark Firefox Internet browser Flash by Adobe flight control Flipboard Ford, Henry Forstall, Scott; in Apple v.

Jony Ive: The Genius Behind Apple's Greatest Products
by Leander Kahney
Published 14 Nov 2013

When Jobs unveiled the iPhone at Macworld in January 2007, he invited his old friend Alan Kay to the launch. Jobs and Kay knew each other from Xerox PARC, and later Kay had been appointed an Apple fellow, a kind of elder statesman, and worked for a decade inside Apple’s Advanced Technology Group in the late nineties. Kay is famous for prophesizing the “Dynabook,” a tablet computer that would provide a window into all the world’s knowledge—back in 1968. On iPhone launch day, Jobs turned to Kay and casually asked, “What do you think, Alan? Is it good enough to criticize?” The question was a reference to a comment made by Kay almost twenty-five years earlier, when he had deemed the original Macintosh “the first computer worth criticizing.”

…

., 71, 123, 130, 210, 214 Costolo, Dick, 258 Cotton, Katie, 254 CRT monitors, Ive’s design for, 79–80 Cue, Eddy, 254 Daily Telegraph, 256 Darbyshire, Martin, 37–44, 45, 46, 48, 49, 56, 57, 58, 59 Dediu, Horace, 246 De Iuliis, Danielle, 70, 82, 84, 86, 150, 166, 192 Dell, 105, 157 De Lucchi, Michele, 44 design story, 116 of iMac, 116 of iPhone, 220 of iPod, 175 design technology (DT), in UK schools, 3–4 detailing, 151–52 The Division, 26 Doonesbury (comic), 77 double-sandwich course structure, at Newcastle Polytechnic, 15–16 Dunn, Jeremy, 7 Dunn, Paul, 118, 119, 120, 121 DuPont, 147 Dynabook, 231 easy access to inside of Macs, 98 Eichler, Joseph, 106 802.11 wireless networking technology, 148–49 Elias, John, 214 Ellison, Larry, 115 eMachines, 135 eMate, 99, 123 Emin, Tracey, 16 engineering department, Apple, 73, 149–50 English, Rick, 69, 73, 74, 78 enterprise resource-planning system (ERP), 203 environmental profile, of Apple, 248–50 Espresso aesthetic, 83–84 Esslinger, Hartmut, 63, 66, 109–10, 112, 114 European Space Agency, 142–43 Extrudo design for iPad, 234–35 for iPhone, 221–22 ExxonMobil, 256 Fadell, Tony as head of iPod division, 199 iPhone and, 216, 217–18, 219 iPod and, 174–78 leaves Apple, 237–38 Fairs, Marcus, 195–96 Fancy Models Corporation, 168 Federighi, Craig, 261 fiddle factor, 22–23, 76 FingerWorks, 214 floppy drive, lack of on iMac, 125, 133–34 Folio keyboard, 56 Ford, 60 Ford, Henry, 107 Forstall, Scott, 163, 216, 218–20, 259, 260, 261, 262, 265 Fortt, Jon, 134 Fortune, 137 Foxconn, 206, 208–10 friction stir welding (FSW), 247 Frog Design, 63, 64, 65–66, 69, 73, 109–10 Fukasawa, Naoto, 46 Furbershaw, Gerard, 31 Fuse Networks, 174 Future Power, 135 Gates, Bill, 136, 254 Gateway, 105 Germanic approach to design education, 17 German Industrie Forum, 42 Gibson, Hal, 134 Giugiaro, Giorgetto, 64–65, 112 Glancey, Jonathan, 196 Goldsmiths, 16–17 Goldstar, 42 Gore, Al, 254 Gorilla Glass, 228 GQ, 195 Gray, Eileen, 44 Gray, Philip J., 10–11, 22, 27, 28, 33, 35, 36, 50–51, 78, 257 green initiatives, of Apple, 248–50 Greenpeace International, 248, 249 GRiD Compass, 20–21 Grinyer, Clive, 20–21, 22–23, 26–27, 30, 34, 37–51, 54, 56, 57–58, 59, 266–67 Grisedale, Sally, 82, 142, 262–63 Guardian, 197, 252 GVO Inc., 31 Haddon, John, 5 “halo” effect, 154, 183, 190 Halpin, Jim, 134 handles on iBooks, 146 on iMac, 124–25 on Power Mac G3, 144 Hargadon, Andrew, 269–70 Harmon Kardon, 258 Harper, Beverley, 74 hearing aid project, 25, 36 Hecht, Sam, 39, 46 Hewlett Packard (HP), 95, 142 Hille, 160 Hirst, Damien, 16 Homayounfar, Amir, 130–31, 149–50 home networking, 148–49 Hon Hai Precision Industry Co.

Steve Jobs
by Walter Isaacson
Published 23 Oct 2011

By the end of 2010, Apple had sold ninety million iPhones, and it reaped more than half of the total profits generated in the global cell phone market. “Steve understands desire,” said Alan Kay, the Xerox PARC pioneer who had envisioned a “Dynabook” tablet computer forty years earlier. Kay was good at making prophetic assessments, so Jobs asked him what he thought of the iPhone. “Make the screen five inches by eight inches, and you’ll rule the world,” Kay said. He did not know that the design of the iPhone had started with, and would someday lead to, ideas for a tablet computer that would fulfill—indeed exceed—his vision for the Dynabook. CHAPTER THIRTY-SEVEN ROUND TWO The Cancer Recurs The Battles of 2008 By the beginning of 2008 it was clear to Jobs and his doctors that his cancer was spreading.

…

It was safely located, for better and for worse, three thousand miles from the commercial pressures of Xerox corporate headquarters in Connecticut. Among its visionaries was the scientist Alan Kay, who had two great maxims that Jobs embraced: “The best way to predict the future is to invent it” and “People who are serious about software should make their own hardware.” Kay pushed the vision of a small personal computer, dubbed the “Dynabook,” that would be easy enough for children to use. So Xerox PARC’s engineers began to develop user-friendly graphics that could replace all of the command lines and DOS prompts that made computer screens intimidating. The metaphor they came up with was that of a desktop. The screen could have many documents and folders on it, and you could use a mouse to point and click on the one you wanted to use.

…

Dre, 402, 406 Donovan, 413, 414 Doonesbury (comic strip), 309 Doors, 413 Draper, John (Captain Crunch), 27, 29 Dream Act, 546 DreamWorks SKG, 427–29 Drexler, Millard “Mickey,” 321, 370, 371–72, 558 Dreyfuss, Richard, 330–31 Dudman, Jack, 40 DuPont, 310, 318 Dylan, Bob, 25–26, 52, 153, 168, 189, 207–8, 212, 251, 330, 400, 402, 403, 412, 413, 421, 494, 561, 570 complete boxed set of, 416–18 SJ’s visit with, 415–16 Dynabook project, 95, 475 Eames, Charles and Ray, 127 Earhart, Amelia, 330 Eason, James, 483–85, 487, 493–94, 550 eBay, 321 ebooks, 503 Economist, 493 Eddie Bauer (store), 369 Edge, The, 411, 411, 420, 421, 423 Edison, Thomas A., 330, 566 education reform movement, 543–44 Egan, Jennifer, 261–63, 438 Egypt, 258 Ehret, Arnold, 36, 548 Eichler, Joseph, 7, 125 Einstein, Albert, xvii, xviii, xix, 91, 119, 171, 330, 332 Eisenhower, Dwight D., 8 Eisenstat, Al, 122, 198, 201, 202–3, 209–10, 216, 221 Eisner, Michael, xiv, 242, 289–92, 428, 432–38, 441 Disney-Pixar merger opposed by, 442 ouster of, 426–27 Senate testimony of, 432–33 SJ’s feud with, 432–35 Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test, The (Wolfe), 58 Electronic Data Systems, 227 Electronic Frontier Foundation, 280 Electronic News, 10 Elias, John, 469 Eliot, T.

The Power Law: Venture Capital and the Making of the New Future
by Sebastian Mallaby
Published 1 Feb 2022

If it couldn’t be a home run, Kleiner did not care if the company struck out. It was like, go big or go home. . . . There is an arrogance to the KP approach. All that ego about changing the world.”[7] Kapor was correct that Doerr’s style invited trouble. Around the same time as the GO fiasco, Doerr and Khosla launched a next-generation laptop company called Dynabook Technologies that burned through $37 million of investors’ capital before closing.[8] Doerr also trumpeted a string of technological prospects that turned out to be busts: human gene screening, anti-aging drugs, designer chemicals.[9] He seemed to have forgotten the old Tom Perkins dictum: when you invest in a company facing a technical challenge, the first thing you do is take the white-hot risks off the table.

…

Clark then looked around for a venture investor with the vision, or perhaps the craziness, to rise above small-minded sticker shock. Naturally, he found his way to John Doerr at Kleiner Perkins. It quickly became clear that Clark had chosen the right target. Doerr’s change-the-world improvisation had gotten him into trouble at GO and Dynabook. But that same excitable ambition was a perfect fit for Mosaic—and, more important, for this moment in history. Previously, when Doerr had boasted that he aimed to create new industries rather than just companies, he had been guilty of hype. But Mosaic really was a revolutionary product. Its browser would change the way that people accessed information, communicated with one another, and collaborated.

…

See Digital Sky Technologies due diligence, 97–98, 104, 114, 214, 240, 323 Dunlevie, Bruce eBay investment, 165–66, 167, 169, 171–72 founding of Benchmark, 161–62 offering advice, 162–63, 165–66, 440n WeWork investment, 342–43, 344, 360, 371–72 du Pont, Lammot, 418n Duquesne University, 256 Durant, Kevin, 302 Dutch auctions, 442n Dylan, Bob, 375 Dynabook Technologies, 128, 146 E EachNet, 233 “early bird,” 314 Eastwood, Clint, 66, 426n eBay, 164–70, 287, 292 Benchmark investment, 164–70, 350, 439n, 440n founding of, 164–65 PayPal acquisition, 206–8, 248 Skype acquisition, 191, 297, 448n Whitman as CEO, 167–69, 184 economic geography, 95–96 Efrusy, Kevin, 249–57, 305 Facebook investment, 253–61, 449n Myspace investment, 252–53 Skype investment, 251–52 egalitarianism, 19, 52–53, 56, 57 Egypt Pyramid Technology Park, 223 8VC, 391 80/20 rule, 7, 131, 209–10 Electroglas, 42–43, 421n Electronic Frontier Foundation, 436n Elfers, Bill, 51–52, 432n employee stock ownership, 45–46, 92, 398 Alibaba, 231, 233 Apple and Markkula, 85 Chinese law and, 231, 232, 233, 240 eBay, 170 Facebook and Milner, 275–77 Fairchild Semiconductor, 36–37, 45, 46, 54 Genentech, 77 Intel and Rock, 56–57, 84, 424n JD.com, 237 tax policy and, 92, 398 Emtage, Alan, 20 endowments.

The Friendly Orange Glow: The Untold Story of the PLATO System and the Dawn of Cyberculture
by Brian Dear
Published 14 Jun 2017

In the minds of people like Kay and Engelbart in December 1968, PLATO was doomed, unless Bitzer and company embraced distributed computing and the idea of “guaranteed cycles,” which was then and would be for a long time largely anathema to CERL mainly on economic grounds. Soon, Kay’s vision for the FLEX computer, a desktop machine, morphed into a portable tablet, much like present-day iPads. He called this the “Dynabook”—his ultimate dream for a lightweight, portable, multimedia computer that incorporated the flat panel display technology he’d seen at Illinois. Two approaches, two different missions, two ways of thinking: two visions for computing collided and bounced away from each other in 1968. It was not the last time they would collide or the last time they would bounce away

…

Japanese companies had also begun work on what would become LCD displays, and later, plasma TVs also based on the Illinois patent. Pake realized that there was plenty going on in the industry already. “We couldn’t add much to that,” he says. “I told Alan, I appreciated the cathode ray tubes were too bulky and power hungry but I said why don’t you go ahead and build a prototype…of the Dynabook you wish you had, even though it’s not portable. He had already started to do that….So he did come to me to want to invest in flat panel displays and I just thought we didn’t have the resources to do that. It turned out retrospectively it was a good decision. We couldn’t have got very much farther with the displays that were already being done.

…

He stated this in no uncertain terms to this author when presented with the Alpert hypothetical, such was the level of his dislike for PLATO. Without Alan Kay, there might not have been a leader within PARC pushing for “guaranteed cycles” at the desktop level, and certainly there would have been no visionary pushing for the Dynabook and all that it entailed. As a consequence, the Alto personal computer would probably have not been made, or if it had been made, it would have lacked all the design details that Kay brought to bear. When asked about this what-if scenario, George Pake remarked, “I think that the whole push toward distributed computing would not have been as strong as it was.”

Track Changes
by Matthew G. Kirschenbaum
Published 1 May 2016

Lisberger hired MacBird, and they went out on a listening tour, which brought them to PARC, where they were received by Alan Kay. Alan Kay is one of the truly legendary names in the computer industry: he coined the term “object-oriented programming” and foresaw tablet computing with a prototype device called the DynaBook.37 His career would eventually take him to both Apple and Walt Disney. Like Andy van Dam and Larry Tesler, he had been present for Englebart’s famous NLS demo in 1968. And like Tesler and Simonyi, he had spent the better part of the decade at Xerox PARC. One of his projects there was called SmallTalk, an early so-called object-oriented language.

…

The most comprehensive study to date of interactive fiction is Nick Montfort, Twisty Little Passages: An Approach to Interactive Fiction (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2003). 90. Simpson, Hitchhiker, 186. As Simpson notes, this claim is disputed by Stephen Fry, an actor and author. 91. Ibid., 185. 92. Indeed, tablets themselves already had a real-world corollary in Alan Kay’s ideas for a Dynabook. See Kay, A Personal Computer for Children of All Ages (Palo Alto, CA: Xerox PARC, 1972), http://www.mprove.de/diplom/gui/kay72.html, pdf. 93. See David B. Williams, Biographical Sketch, pt. 2., Vance Museum, http://www.vancemuseum.com/vance_bio_2.htm. 94. As detailed in John Vance, “Lurulu Completed,” Cosmopolis, February 2003, 1, http://www.integralarchive.org/cosmo/Cosmopolis-35.pdf.

Code: The Hidden Language of Computer Hardware and Software
by Charles Petzold
Published 28 Sep 1999

Xerox had founded the Palo Alto Research Center (PARC) in 1970 in part to help develop products that would allow the company to enter the computer industry. Perhaps the most famous visionary at PARC was Alan Kay (born 1940), who encountered Van Bush's microfilm library (in a short story by Robert Heinlein) when he was 14, and who had already conceived of a portable computer he called the Dynabook. The first big project at PARC was the Alto, designed and built between 1972 and 1973. By the standards of those years, it was an impressive piece of work. The floor-standing system unit had 16-bit processing, two 3-MB disk drives, 128 KB of memory (expandable to 512 KB), and a mouse with three buttons.

Dreaming in Code: Two Dozen Programmers, Three Years, 4,732 Bugs, and One Quest for Transcendent Software
by Scott Rosenberg
Published 2 Jan 2006

People don’t understand that there are alternatives. We need software that’s factors of hundreds better than it is.” At Xerox PARC in the seventies, Kay coined the term “object-oriented programming,” invented the concept of the overlapping windows interface, and tried to realize his 1968 vision of the Dynabook—an ur-laptop that he dreamed could serve as the ultimate playground for childhood imaginations. In the decades since, he watched the hardware industry gradually deliver computing tools that resembled his ideas—while the software field, in his view, stagnated. Kay loves to use historical analogies when he talks about software.

The Code: Silicon Valley and the Remaking of America
by Margaret O'Mara
Published 8 Jul 2019

Cell phones were already a massive market, but Jobs was less interested in imitating what was already out there than he was in creating something quite different: an intuitive, elegantly designed handheld computer. THE SUPERCOMPUTER IN YOUR POCKET Silicon Valley technologists had been trying to build such a device since before the Apple II. It had been an arduous quest. In 1972, Xerox PARC’s Alan Kay had mocked up a prototype of a mobile companion for young children that he called the “Dynabook.” In 1991, an all-star roster of Silicon Valley insiders came together to launch Go Corp., developing software for a notebook-sized computer that used a stylus instead of a keyboard. Despite having Bill Campbell as CEO and John Doerr as a major investor, Go was too far ahead of its time. Apple made its own foray into stylus-and-notebook computing with the Newton MessagePad.