In this month's IEEE Computer, an article by Bill Schilit and his
colleagues at Fuji-Xerox and Xerox PARC entitled "As We May Read: The
Reading Appliance Revolution," begins:

"In the 1970's, Alan Kay and his colleagues at Xerox PARC envisioned a
dynamic, interactive book.  Now, nearly 30 years later, that vision has
become a reality."

Wow, I think, they've got DynaBooks!

Well, no, not really.  Well, actually, they're not even trying.  Their goal
is to make electronic paper.

The article is all about supporting reading, providing
searching/linking/organizing, annotation support, battery weight and screen
resolution, doing formatting right, etc.  It's all good stuff, but...

None of the stuff about "metamedia" is there, which was in the original
"Personal Dynamic Media."  The idea that a computer could be movies +
graphics art + well-formatted text + truly interactive computational
elements was key to the notion of a metamedium, which is what DynaBook
documents were supposed to be, I thought.  All the text in the AWMR piece
looks like it could be from the Web.  They don't talk about creating the
next printing press, nor about what it might be like to create truly
interactive documents.  This is about creating something that's like paper,
but it's electronic, and thus searchable/linkable/filterable/etc-able.

But maybe I'm reading it wrong.  Do others on this list know this work?  Is
the eventual goal to actually create something like the DynaBook, or is
does this paper really reflect the realization of this vision?

Mark

--------------------------
Mark Guzdial : Georgia Tech : College of Computing : Atlanta, GA 30332-0280
(404) 894-5618 : Fax (404) 894-0673 : guzdial at cc.gatech.edu
http://www.cc.gatech.edu/gvu/people/Faculty/Mark.Guzdial.html