Alan,

Thanks for the latest thoughts on the Dynabook.  One of the things that
struck me when I read your original thoughts, back in the '70s, was that
the Dynabook wasn't intended solely as a programming medium, but that
programming was to be a part of a larger set of "literary" skills that a
user would have or be developing.

At the time, I knew very few people, other than myself, who believed
that graphics and sound should be an important part of a user's
repertoire of input *and* output modes.  I was excited by the idea that
drawing and sketching, and freehand *entry* of data would be supported,
at a time when spatial *selection* of data by a user (damn near all you
can do with a hockey-puck :-) was considered a far-out idea by most.

There's an aspect of the use of such a beast that I haven't seem much,
if any, discussion of, that I'd like to bring up.  You wrote:

>>      One of the titles of an early paper was "A Dynamic Medium for Creative
>> Thought", and the main analogy was always to art and literature (especially
>> of the scientific type). In another early paper, I called the computer a
>> "metamedium" since its content was dynamic descriptions of media. The most
>> important new powerful idea that the computer brought to art and literature
>> (and civilization) was the ability to dynamically simulate descriptions of
>> ideas as opposed to just stating them. This could be the basis for
>> completely new set of end-user and human to human relationships with
>> "powerful ideas" that would be as world changing as the analogous new
>> properties brought by the printing press and the eventual incredible
>> changes in world view and how we describe and argue about ideas.

Many of the areas of discourse you've mentioned, such as literature,
mathematics, science, philosophy, etc., involve interchange and
perception of rational (i.e., symbolic) statements about other symbolic
structures.  That is, we use symbol structures to describe and reason
about other symbol structures.  Some of those areas, however, have a
non-natural-language, if not non-symbolic, component, for instance, the
visual arts.  Sketches can be used as input, as output, or as
intermediate data in analysis.  A computer can act as a sketchpad, as an
editing tool, as an image archive and retrieving tool, as an image
processor and analyzer, and as a display medium for finished work.

As I understand it, the thrust of your notion of relationship to
"powerful ideas" is that the Dynabook allows harnessing the non-symbolic
modes of human sensory-motor I/O to inputting, selecting, and outputting
views of symbolic information.  But there are a lot of areas of human
experience and endeavor which have large non-symbolic components.  In
many cases these components, or at least their physical manifestations,
can be digitized, stored, analyzed and reproduced.  For instance, the
human experience of a painting is not symbolic, even if the painting
itself can be digitized, and stored in many different symbolic forms.
Even music, which is often very formalized, and susceptable to symbolic
analysis, has a strong non-symbolic component.

Of course the use of computers to aid in the creation and analysis of
art is my own hobbyhorse, and I don't expect others to share it (though
I'm very pleased at how many do).  But I am curious if this area is one
that's part of the core of your work, or a more peripheral part,
subordinate to the creation of a more symbolic "literature", and if is
part of the core, if you want to talk about that part of the work at
this point.
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"Only a proper understanding of the constraints imposed by the
properties of our space and of the rich repertoire permitted within
these constraints allow the achievement of a balanced disciplined
freedom."  - Arthur Loeb in "Concepts and Images"
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Bruce Cohen,                               |  email: cohenb at gemstone.com
GemStone Systems, Inc.                     |  phone: (503)533-3602
20575 NW Von Neumann Drive                 |  fax:   (503)629-8556
Beaverton, OR USA 97006                    |  web:   http://www.gemstone.com