I've been giving some thought to the Lampson/Thacker Dynabook thread, and
my take is that they're only addressing part of the problem, and perhaps
not the tougher part.

To me, the Dynabook Vision has always been a joint hardware and software
vision.  Yes, a cool notebook with a great display and a stylus is
essential, but being a software guy, I focus on the latter part.  The
Dynabook is supposed to allow for the creation of "personal dynamic media."
End users, such as kids, should be able to create music, animations, new
kinds of stories, and new kinds of media.  Expertise should count with a
Dynabook -- long-time users and gifted artists should really be able to
make a Dynabook sing, but anyone should be able to create media with a
Dynabook.  The Dynabook vision is to be the printing press of a new
computational metamedium.

I believe that Lampson and Thacker can do the hardware, and if they do it,
it'll be great.  But I don't believe that Microsoft is the place to get the
Dynabook software out of.  This is the place that sees Visual Basic for
Applications as an end-user programming language, whose notion of media
creation for children is Microsoft Works, and whose notion of a rich
multimedia workshop is, well, nonexistent.  There is the Microsoft
streaming video stuff, but that's for distributing media, not creating it.

My Armchair-Psychologist guess is that the inability to really grok
Dynabook stems from a misplanted root: Bill Gates reportedly is the world's
biggest fan of Basic.  I like Basic a lot -- as is true for many others, it
was my first programming language.  But if you think Basic is the end-all,
you're not going to see what Smalltalk (and Logo and Lisp, and other very
non-Basic-y) languages have to offer.

Mark

--------------------------
Mark Guzdial : Georgia Tech : College of Computing : Atlanta, GA 30332-0280
(404) 894-5618 : Fax (404) 894-0673 : guzdial at cc.gatech.edu
http://www.cc.gatech.edu/gvu/people/Faculty/Mark.Guzdial.html