Alan Kay <Alan.Kay at squeakland.org> wrote:

> BTW, Bill Atkinson's theory of the Dynabook was that it should be 
> just a virtual notebook of stacked virtual sheets that you could flip 
> and search and draw on in various ways. His first pass at a real 
> system along these lines was called Hypercard -- and I think this is 
> still a very good model.
As I'm sure you'll recall, this was the model for the Active Book. We
guaranteed that everything was between the front page and the back page
(which sounds a bit trite now but was quite revolutionary back in 89)
and that if push came to shove you could find stuff by flipping pages.

The good news is that there is quite a bit of suitable hardware
available. Various tablet type machines are on sale although they
seem to be awfully expensive right now. Partly it's because they're all
a bit of a kludge around the display/digitiser area. IF the format takes
of then LCD manufacturers will be willing to invest in the work to
integrate them better. However, history is littered with failed attempts
at tablets and not many people seem to think that M$ latest effort will
be a big success.

Building an ARM based machine to be a dynabook is not too hard. I've
been involved in two technically successful such projects that both got
killed by political manouevering by commercial rivals.  ADS sell a nice
board with a fast-ish XScale, decent graphics, a good pile of ram/flash,
networking etc for ~$400. Add a 12 or 15" lcd (it's quite hard to find
anything smaller) from EarthLCD. I could arrange manufacture of cases
via CNC for small quantities. The trickiest part is the digitiser and
controller. A couple of people make something vaguely like this but they
tend to be tied to wince or some other annoyance.

Seriously, it's not a terribly difficult project on a technical level.
The hard part is the commercial justification, getting money, making a
market. Same as always.

tim
--
Tim Rowledge, tim at sumeru.stanford.edu, http://sumeru.stanford.edu/tim
Klingon Code Warrior:- 8) "By filing this bug you have questioned my
family honor. Prepare to die!"