Dynabook hw cost

Howard Stearns hstearns at wisc.edu
Tue May 22 14:44:37 UTC 2007


I'm thinking not in terms of what it is, but rather how and in what context it 
would be used:

* To be used ubiquitously in any context, it needs to not only be small and have 
good battery life, but it needs to be cheap and "losable."  I think Alan gives 
an example of taking it to the beach or a raft in the pool. (This also implies 
replicated external storage.)

* I don't want to just execute prescribed tasks with it, I want to explore and 
problem-solve (e.g., in the http://nakedobjects.org sense). This may be getting 
beyond the scope of an electronic book, but I think this is consistent with the 
general thrust of the dynabook and dynamic languages community. (You could maybe 
argue that real books with pages are more exploratory/problem-solving than 
scrolls.) In any case, my feeling (which I'm a relatively recent convert to) is 
that the best way to do this is with direct manipulation (in both the language 
sense like self, and the UI sense like the iPhone).

* The things I want to explore and manipulate include all media, for which I 
want to both get existing media/communications (networked) and capture my own 
(camera and microphone, possibly in stereo or higher degrees for 3D scanning).

I don't think the hardware -- or the software -- is quite there yet to 
accomplish all this, but it's getting close. To the degree that one believes 
that the dynabook hasn't really happened yet, I wonder if it is because we have 
not yet satisfyingly achieved all the above simultaneously.

-H

subbukk wrote:
> On Tuesday 22 May 2007 11:42 am, Brad Fuller wrote:
>> Any thoughts about the specs of the Dynabook and why we are still
>> waiting? (hmm... is the XO is close?... wonder if parts will be available)
> AFAIK, the driving factors for personal computing has always been battery 
> life, weight, networking and tight integration between hardware and operating 
> software (i.e. no superfluous components) in that order. It is frustrating to 
> see computing devices sold by megahertz, multi-core, RAM/HDD capacity, camera 
> megapixels and so on.
> 
> I think the word book in the name biases us to think of a screen built into 
> the machine. If we drop this assumption, then a Dynabook could just be a 
> small computer embedded in a foldable panel that opens out to a 84-key 
> keyboard and a small 2" preview OLED screen at the top and a resistive 
> touchpad at the bottom. A micro-projector would cast a screen upto 17". USB 
> slots along the edges take in flash memory cards for user-data. When a card 
> is plugged in, the machine starts up automatically and personalizes itself 
> based on files on card. When the card is ejected, the system shuts down.
> 
> Dreaming :-) .. Subbu
> 



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