Dynabook Usability

Jack Johnson fragment at nas.com
Sun Aug 24 17:20:31 UTC 2003


Alan Kay wrote:
> things could be carried in one hand). A number of different calculations 
> from 1968 onwards indicated that about 1M pixels were needed to do 
> "mostly everything". This number remained quite constant over the years 
> and approaches (only being able to contemplate 500K pixels or less in 
> the early days of PARC was one of the irritants that led to the 
> overlapping window idea).

Does this mean that earlier ideas (and potentially your ideal 
environment) were tile-based, like Wirth's Oberon or Plan 9's acme 
interface?

(Rob Pike attributes acme's UI to Oberon's UI, and Wirth says Oberon's 
UI came from seeing *something* at PARC)

Do you have mockups or screenshots of what you envisioned a 1M pixel 
non-overlapping window environment would look like?  How do you think it 
might have impacted the future course of events if you had 1M pixels 
right out of the gate?

-Jack



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