Dynabook Usability

Alan Kay Alan.Kay at squeakland.org
Thu Aug 21 18:41:55 UTC 2003


Hi Tim --

At 9:55 AM -0700 8/21/03, Tim Rowledge wrote:
>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.

Now, I do..... It was a wonderful machine and concept!

Cheers,

Alan

>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!"


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