Active Book

Brad Fuller bradallenfuller at yahoo.com
Sun Oct 14 00:09:47 UTC 2007


tim Rowledge wrote:
>
> On 13-Oct-07, at 12:17 PM, Brad Fuller wrote:
>
>
>> can you tell us more about the Active Book you worked on 20 years ago?
>
> Oh my, most of the old-timers will know that I can go on about that 
> for hours. Days!
>
> OK, try to keep it short tim -
>
> The Active Book was a neat idea (especially for 1988) to make a 
> portable tablet like computer with a digitiser screen, lots of power 
> and a decent user interface. In short, someone's idea of a dynabook. 
> The UI concept was to emulate a book but extend the idiom in the ways 
> that a dynamic system could allow. So, documents were to be on pages 
> and flipping pages would move between docs and the systems running 
> them. No real use for overlapping windows - they were a foreign 
> concept to almost everyone outside a limited world back then. The idea 
> of the book was really to provide a concept of a contained world with 
> logical separation between parts; just like a book has everything 
> between the front and back pages and separated into chapters etc. I 
> suspect it wouldn't really seem so neat these days now that we're all 
> so used to Windows and OSX etc.
>
> The hardware was about the size of a MacBook, a bit thicker since the 
> practical batteries back then were rather large cylinders. It had a 
> whopping great big screen of amazing 640 by 400 resolution, monchrome. 
> There was  stylus based digitiser and a panel to one side (can't 
> remember which) that was a finger activated digitiser, intended for 
> 'other input'. I'm pretty sure it was Bill Buxton that convinced them 
> of the usefulness of that idea.
>
> It had an ARM2aS cpu running at 4MHz (maybe 6?) and 1Mb ram for 
> everything - screen memory, fax filing, OS, the lot. Oh and 1Mb ROM 
> too. The ARM was custom designed in-house to extend the basic ARM 
> architecture to allow implementation as a static logic part, meaning 
> we could simply turn off the power and it would sit there until it was 
> time to go again. For cpu history buffs, the ARM 2 series had no 
> cache; none at all. Not even an instruction prefetch queue. It was the 
> first broadly used RISC machine (yes I know about the Sparc) and 
> required  whopping great 25,000 transistors worth of silicon. In fact 
> we used to joke about '25,000 transistors and no Gates'. Even the 
> latest ARM cores need barely 50,00 transistors I'm told. Despite the 
> above, the Acorn desktop machines that were on sale back then and 
> using the base ARM2 cpus were several times faster than the hottest 
> intel based boxes of the time.
>
> The OS was a version of Helios (eek, I still have a copy of the Helios 
> manual in my bookshelf!) which I think started out life as TripOS at 
> Cambridge (the real university, not the US) as a multi-processor 
> system using messaging, or something like that. It was wrapped in a 
> unix-like layer to please the unix-weenies.
>
> On top of that was Smalltalk. The VM was derived from EliotMiranda's 
> famous BrouHaHa with a lot of extension for multiple non-contiguous 
> memory spaces, ROMability, survivability, extra prims, blah blah blah. 
> One of the acceptance tests for releases was to use up enough memory 
> to get down to a couple of hundred bytes left and see if it could open 
> a notifier, let the user kill the process and recover to full 
> usefulness. Try doing that in most modern systems.. The image was 
> licensed from ParcPlace, probably through Smalltalk Express though who 
> knows what went on in that particular liaison? A small number of smart 
> people worked on the image to make it do what was needed and some 
> really interesting stuff was written. What really seems amazing to me 
> now is that even with such a puny cpu and tiny amount of memory the UI 
> was very snappy. You could for example draw/scribble on the screen and 
> produce a drawing (not a bitmp type scribble) that kept up with the 
> scribble. Then choose the eraser and scribble with that to erase 
> *sections* of the lines. I bet they were even the correct sections! 
> Remember, this is a cpu with less power than the one in your keyboard, 
> probably with less memory than in your keyboard, running a fairly 
> simple interpreted Smalltalk VM. You can see why I've always laughed 
> hysterically at people that tried to claim Smalltalk is slow.
>
> Anyway, we worked on this for a couple of years and the prototypes 
> were getting good reviews from early testers. Apple was peripherally 
> involved with the ARM since it had decide the Hobbit/CRISP that had 
> been intended for what became the Newton was no good; around then 
> Acorn, Apple and VTI formed ARM  Ltd. Interestingly enough a little 
> company in silicon valley decided to use the Hobbit for their attempt 
> at a tablet; eventually they realised that the Active Book was much 
> better and bought out the owners. And just junked everything. Oh, yes, 
> that was ATT, who had created that dreadful thing called PenPoint and 
> the tablet that ran it. It never went anywhere. I had one for a while. 
> Dreadful; slow as... well about as slow as a lot of modern machines 
> when they haven't enough memory, despite their adverts claiming how it 
> was so fast because of the carefully hand optimised code.
>
> Oh, we should note that in the same time period there was another 
> tablet machine around that happened to be based on Digitalk's 
> Smalltalk; the Momenta.
Thanks Tim. I enjoy hearing people's history with technology. I remember 
the Momenta. I remember going somewhere (can't remember, maybe to a 
seminar) to see it before it came out. I thought it was great that is 
was based on smalltalk.

Looking on the net, I see that Active Book was more than a product, it 
was also the name of the company by Hermann Hauser



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