Hi-
Yes, I meant one that mactched your ideal, not the Microsoft one.
D

Alan Kay wrote:

> Well, as Andreas pointed out, one really needs a keyboard as part of
> the idea. If you look at the earliest photograph of the cardboard
> model from 1968, you will see that it has a keyboard -- harder to see
> is the stylus which is embedded in the side. These considerations came
> from a fair amount of use of both GRAIL at RAND (a completely penbased
> system with a great realtime character recognizer), and of NLS
> (Engelbart's system that used mouse, chord keyboard and regular
> keyboard). One could go fairly quickly with both the character
> recognizer and the chord keyboard, but not quickly enough to do large
> scale compositions in text. These were great for small scale
> compositions, such as typos, names, a few lines of code, etc. For this
> reason Engelbart had a regular keyboard in between the mouse and the
> chord keyboard, that you would switch to when you had large amounts of
> text to input. We all realized that this would have been a good idea
> for GRAIL, and I incorporated the idea in the original Dynabook model,
> on the grounds that even a perfect instant character recognizer
> couldn't do the whole job.     Most of the tablet computers from
> Newton onwards have had marketing people in the way who want real
> differentiation in the product and don't care about actual human use.
> In the MS Tablet, they really need to have something like a
> flip-from-underside keyboard for real use. (I didn't put that in the
> first model because I would have been very happy to have any portable
> flat-screen display at that time, the squarish one shown here would
> have been just fine with me. BTW, the Owens-Illinois plasma panel
> (512*512) was happening at the time but it drew too much power. There
> were also a few LC panels being pioneered at
> Westinghouse. Cheers, Alan[Image]At 7:43 AM -0700 4/26/01, David P.
> Harris wrote:
>
>> I imagine that getting a 'real' Dynabook will be a grand experience
>> for
>> you.  Here's hoping it will happen in the near future!
>> D
>>
>>
>> Alan Kay wrote:
>>
>> > BTW Squeak runs beautifully on Chuck's* machine.  Using the
>> fleshed
>> > out media version of Squeak on the Tablet is the closest thing to
>> a
>> > complete Dynabook experience I've yet had. Cheers, Alan *The
>> "Tablet"
>> > was done by Chuck Thacker who did the Xerox PARC computers, and by
>>
>> > Butler Lampson who was one of the leading lights at PARC. It's
>> really
>> > nice, and only 1 pound too heavy. -------- At 6:17 PM -0500
>> 4/25/01,
>> > Larry Trutter wrote:
>> >
>> >> There is a brief article in Newsweek (April 30th, 2001 issue)
>> about
>> >> the "Dynabook-like" computer being
>> >
>> >> developed by Microsoft. It contains some quotes from Alan Kay and
>>
>> >> some history.
>> >
>> >>
>> >
>> >> The author of the article did not seem to grasp the meaning of
>> the
>> >> Dynabook as envisioned by Alan Kay. It bascially described an
>> >> unltra-portable computer with character-recognition capability.
>> The
>> >> article discussed
>> >
>> >> benefits such as information and convenience but not one word
>> about
>> >> the potential of the real Dynabook.
>> >
>> >>
>> >
>> >> That's all I remember, I just borrowed the magazine during lunch
>> >> hour at a restaurant......
>> >
>> >>
>> >
>> >> FYI,
>> >
>> >> Larry Trutter
>> >
>> >
>
>