You may be right.  I do know that Lampson and Thacker have excellent
pedigrees.  But if cultural gap is as large as you describe, then even if
Lampson and Thacker are successful, the Microsoft Dynabook may never see
the light of day -- for the same reasons that we're all not using
descendants of Altos today :-)

Mark


>You're confusing Microsoft's engineering team with Microsoft Research.
>The former does all of those things that we hate, and the latter is
>full of great people stolen from other great research institutions.
>Butler Lampson is an old fart in advanced languages and he did a lot
>of the founding work for Modula-3. He has a lot of interesting papers
>that all should probably read (though no need to read them all)
>
>I'm pretty sure, as long as my the wiring in my brain works today,
>that Lampson used to be at Xerox PARC before he got scooped up by DEC
>SRC. So he's well aware of Smalltalk. My guess is that, as a research
>group, they will want to do something a little revolutionary in the
>software/programming end.
>
>The other possibility, my brain tells me, is that Lampson was at SRI,
>in which case he'd also be useful for making sure an advanced language
>underlies the prototype.
>
>-John
>
>----- Original Message -----
>From: Mark Guzdial <guzdial at cc.gatech.edu>
>To: <squeak at cs.uiuc.edu>
>Sent: Tuesday, September 14, 1999 11:13 AM
>Subject: Microsoft Dynabook? PSHAW!
>
>
>> I've been giving some thought to the Lampson/Thacker Dynabook
>thread, and
>> my take is that they're only addressing part of the problem, and
>perhaps
>> not the tougher part.
>>
>> To me, the Dynabook Vision has always been a joint hardware and
>software
>> vision.  Yes, a cool notebook with a great display and a stylus is
>> essential, but being a software guy, I focus on the latter part.
>The
>> Dynabook is supposed to allow for the creation of "personal dynamic
>media."
>> End users, such as kids, should be able to create music, animations,
>new
>> kinds of stories, and new kinds of media.  Expertise should count
>with a
>> Dynabook -- long-time users and gifted artists should really be able
>to
>> make a Dynabook sing, but anyone should be able to create media with
>a
>> Dynabook.  The Dynabook vision is to be the printing press of a new
>> computational metamedium.
>>
>> I believe that Lampson and Thacker can do the hardware, and if they
>do it,
>> it'll be great.  But I don't believe that Microsoft is the place to
>get the
>> Dynabook software out of.  This is the place that sees Visual Basic
>for
>> Applications as an end-user programming language, whose notion of
>media
>> creation for children is Microsoft Works, and whose notion of a rich
>> multimedia workshop is, well, nonexistent.  There is the Microsoft
>> streaming video stuff, but that's for distributing media, not
>creating it.
>>
>> My Armchair-Psychologist guess is that the inability to really grok
>> Dynabook stems from a misplanted root: Bill Gates reportedly is the
>world's
>> biggest fan of Basic.  I like Basic a lot -- as is true for many
>others, it
>> was my first programming language.  But if you think Basic is the
>end-all,
>> you're not going to see what Smalltalk (and Logo and Lisp, and other
>very
>> non-Basic-y) languages have to offer.
>>
>> 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
>>
>>
>>


--------------------------
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