Dynabook Usability

Tim Rowledge tim at sumeru.stanford.edu
Thu Aug 28 17:19:41 UTC 2003


Doug Way <dway at riskmetrics.com> wrote:

> Right.  At least with Gary's example of flipping the pages of a 
> notebook, you can only ever see two pages at a time at most anyway.  So, 
> there is no real advantage in flipping a physical page versus pressing a 
> button to see a new virtual page on the screen.  So you don't need more 
> than two screens.
Yes _but_. But, as in note how good we are at being able to open a book
at roughly the right place and then very quickly scanning for the exact
spot. If (big if) our computers and screens were fast enough we might be
able to find a similar capability to match that.

> Speaking of hardware innovations, though, one idea I've thought would be 
> interesting:  If you had a truly flexible screen technology, you could 
> have a dynabook with the form factor of a scroll.  When rolled up, you'd 
> have a very portable (say) 6" long stick, which you could then unroll 
> into a 12"x6" screen.
I proposed this waaaaay back when I was at the RCA in '84 and the
fastest personal machines were 1MHz 6502s (the BBC micro was much faster
than the IBM pc at the time) and graphic displays weren't even in most
people's dream. I really wish I had published something at the time.
Fairly soon it will be possible and the irony is that one of the people
'in charge' of a major player in the game is actually the guy who
started Acorn and Active Book.

tim
--
Tim Rowledge, tim at sumeru.stanford.edu, http://sumeru.stanford.edu/tim
Useful Latin Phrases:- Cave ne ante ullas catapultas ambules = If I were
you, I wouldn't walk in front of any catapults.



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