A Failure of Sarcasm

[jeff_duntemann]

As people who have known me a long time will understand, I was clearly not born to dance, appreciate opera, or play competitive sports. I may also be incapable of sarcasm, perhaps because I don't use it much and nobody expects it.

Ok. A couple of people have written to me in shock with respect

Comments

Wow, have you seen this?

[baron_waste]

http://www.wheels.org/spacewar/stone/rolling_stone.html

Alan is designing a hand-held stand-alone interactive-graphic computer (about the size, shape and diversity of a Whole Earth Catalog, electric) called "Dynabook." It's mostly high-resolution display screen, with a keyboard on the lower third and various cassette- loading slots, optional hook-up plugs, etc. His colleague Bill English describes the fantasy. thus:

"It stores a couple of million characters of text and does all the text handling for you - editing, viewing, scanning, things of that nature. It'll have a graphics capability which'll let you make sketches, make drawings. Alan wants to incorporate music in it so you can use it for composing. It has the Smalltalk language capability which lets people program their own things very easily. We want to interface them with a tinker-toy kind of thing. And of course it plays Spacewar."

The drawing capability is a program that Kay designed called "Paintbrush." Working with a stylus on the display screen, you reach up and select a shape of brush, then move the brush over and pick up a shade of half-tone-screen you like, then paint with it. If you make a mistake, paint it out with "white." The screen simultaneously displays the image you're working on and a one-third reduction of it, where the dot pattern becomes a shaded half-tone.

A Dynabook could link up with other Dynabooks, with library facilities, with the telephone, and it could go and hide where a child hides. Alan is determined to keep the cost below $500 so that school systems could provide Dynabooks free out of their textbook budgets. If Xerox Corporation decides to go with the concept, the Dynabooks could be available in two or three years, but that's up to Product Development, not Alan or the Research Center. Peter Deutsch comments: "Processors and memories are getting smaller and cheaper. Five years ago the idea of the Dynabook would have been a absolutely ridiculous. Now it merely seems difficult..."

ROLLING STONE · 7 DECEMBER 1972

Re: Wow, have you seen this?

[jeff_duntemann]

Better yet: I was there when some of that stuff was going on, and knew a few of the people who were doing it. I worked for Xerox from 1974-1985, and PARC had a facility outside of Rochester NY. Some of the PARC guys were in the Xerox ham radio club, and I spent a fair amount of time talking to them. My department had an Alto, and I conned my boss into buying a spare disk pack for it so I could mess around with it, and get my first experience with Smalltalk.

Back in the very early 80s I was given a copy of Personal Dynamic Media, an in-house PARC book that explained Alan Kay's vision in detail, and had pictures of the Dynabook mock-ups that eerily prefigured laptops. I posted a scan of the mockup on Contra in my March 8, 2006 entry:

http://www.duntemann.com/march2006.htm#03-08-2006

Xerox was famous for having great ideas and then being totally incapable of monetizing them, and the reason was nothing more than incompetent management. When I left Xerox, that was about 40% of the reason; the other 60% was the huge raise that Ziff-Davis offered me to move into technical publishing. Egad, had Xerox been better managed I might still be there.

Re: Wow, have you seen this?

[jeff_duntemann]

A 1977 excerpt from Personal Dynamic Media can be found here:

http://mrl.nyu.edu/~noah/nmr/book_samples/nmr-26-kay.pdf

I have never seen a posting of the full book, which is 75 pages long and was published in 1976. I don't think it was ever distributed outside of Xerox.