Dynabook Usability

Jecel Assumpcao Jr jecel at merlintec.com
Wed Aug 27 01:55:17 UTC 2003


On Saturday 23 August 2003 22:05, Alan Kay wrote:
> This idea was in the notorious "Pendry Papers" that a bunch of us
> wrote at PARC in 1971, and then used in the "The Knowledge Navigator"
> "visionary video" that we did at Apple long ago. Dick Bolt (a
> terrific UI designer who worked for Nicholas in the heyday of ArchMac
> came up with many wonderful ways to use such a camera.

I liked the Knowledge Navigator video a lot. But the camera was facing 
the user, like in a video phone. I am not surprised others had thought 
of the user view camera, though. It is kind of an obvious idea.

> Yep, this is an old one that is still kicking around. That was the
> scheme I used in one of the double screen Dynabook designs. I still
> think this collection of features is a pretty nice alternative design
> center to the classical 1968 Dynabook design. There are many good
> drawer schemes around (Ike Nassi did a good one in a penbased system
> he did in a startup for an unnamed larger company).

I haven't seen cheap 8" displays that could be used for this, however. 
There are some used one from old Toshiba machines that are on a special 
sale for $89 each, but that isn't good enough for production. And the 
number of colors is disappoining. I have seen new LCDs (Optrex and 
Toshiba) for over $400 in single quantities, but they seemed to be 
designed for industrial use.

This technology looks interesting: http://www.iridigm.com/

-- Jecel



More information about the Squeak-dev mailing list