[podperson]

It's funny how various folk cite Alan Kay's Dynabook "vision" but plenty of people had this "vision" (witness the "prior art" for the iPad in 2001 or Hari Seldon's electronic notepad in Isaac Asimov's "Foundation"). Steve Jobs was designing notebooks and tablets on a sketchpad when the Mac was being developed. Bill Atkinson had a similar "vision" which led to his developing HyperCard (because it could be done at the time).

[vanderZwan]

Get your history straight:

"In 1968 — three years before the invention of the microprocessor — Alan Kay stumbled across Don Bitzer's early flat-panel display. Its resolution was 16 pixels by 16 pixels — an impressive improvement over their earlier 4 pixel by 4 pixel display. Alan saw those 256 glowing orange squares, and he went home, and he picked up a pen, and he drew a picture of a goddamn iPad. And then he chased that carrot through decades of groundbreaking research, much of which is responsible for the hardware and software that you're currently reading this with."

http://worrydream.com/ABriefRantOnTheFutureOfInteractionDesi...

Alan Kay is the goddamn Carl Friedrich Gauss of Interaction Design (Leonhard Euler was already taken by Douglas Engelbart).

[podperson]

Go read "Foundation" by Isaac Asimov and note the description of Hari Seldon's notepad. I believed it was written in the 50s, but Wikipedia says 1942. (Maybe 1942 refers to a short story that became part of it.)

In WWII Douglas Engelbart was trained as a radar operator. After WWII he is exposed to computers (driven by punchcards and tape, and emitting printed output) and immediately thinks "these should interact via cathode ray tubes".

It seems to me that anyone with imagination who could grok what a computer was immediately imagined the computer being embedded in any information device they could think of -- whether it's a watch, a notepad, a telephone, or the human brain.

The "light pen" was invented in 1952. Do you think the inventor's "vision" was that it be part of a monstrously big, complex, and expensive piece of hardware? (Do you think he/she hadn't read "Foundation"?)

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Light_pen

Alan Kay has done many amazing things, we don't need to fight about this specific thing.

[vanderZwan]

Writing science fiction is one thing, pursuing your vision and getting it made into a reality is entirely another. But you're right - we are probably more in agreement than disagreement.

[podperson]

I was mainly overreacting to the original article which is excessively worshipful. It's hard to argue against Alan Kay's importance, but likewise Donald Knuth, Engelbart, and Kernighan (among the living). All these guys relentlessly pursued pieces of the vision that makes the Macbook Pro I'm typing this on possible. The visible form factor is, I think, almost the least important (and most obvious) pieces of the puzzle. After all, the typewriter and the notepad are the same form factors as my laptop/PC and iPad.

[david927]

Not that funny -- it was Alan's dissertation, a quite serious work, and it was done in... 1968!

In fact, you could say it was his push for the Dynabook that helped usher in the personal computer as well as WYSIWYG, etc.

[seanmcdirmid]

When Alan Kay started grad school at Utah, he was handed a bunch of papers on SketchPad, which was done in 1963 :) So the dominoes started falling...SketchPad inspires both Smalltalk and GUI computing.

[aaronblohowiak]

Do you know of any modern attempts at SketchPad?

[lukego]

There is a Squeak-based faithful recreation of Sketchpad at around 12:30 in Alan Kay's talk here: http://amturing.acm.org/acm_tcc_webcasts.cfm.