Netbook inventor not very impressed after waiting 40 years for first model Print
By Julian Prokaza on Wednesday, 05 November 2008

Dynabook concept mock-up. (c) Alan KayIf you thought the netbook was a fresh and exciting idea only now made possible by innovative technological developments – think again. Alan Kay came up with the idea way back in 1968 and despite waiting 40 years for manufacturers to catch on to his clever idea, he’s less than impressed by what they’ve all come up with so far.

Alan Kay concocted the netbook while at the Xerox Palo Alto Research Center, only he termed it the “DynaBook” (no relation to Toshiba’s DynaBook). In a paper he published in 1972, he described a cheap, portable PC aimed primarily at children, the DynaBook had both touch-screen and keyboard, and could be used as an e-book reader, word processor and games console – complete with graphical user interface (something else that Kay had invented earlier at Xerox).

Dynabook

Kay even foresaw the advent of the modern internet with the devices connection to the “Liblink” – an electronic connection to “the thought and knowledge of ages past”. Oh, and it could copy and paste, too. 40 years ago, no less...


Kay reckoned that the DynaBook was “within reach of current technology”, but it’s impossible to see how something so small and sophisticated could be manufactured at that time (although a 1in flat-panel display was apparently demonstrated at the University of Illinois in 1968).

Texas Instruments’ Speak & Spell was one of the first devices to offer anything like its form, but had nowhere near the DynaBook’s function. In fact the Sinclair Z88 was perhaps the earliest computer to approach Kay’s vision – and that didn’t turn up until 20 years later.

TI Speak & SpellSinclair Z88 (c) www.retrothing.com

And then came the netbook. Small, light and (usually) inexpensive, it does almost everything that Kay envisioned for the DynaBook – and it’s cheaper, too. Kay proposed that his DynaBook should cost no more that $500 (for 8Kb of RAM), which is rather a lot of money by today’s reckoning.

Asus Eee PC 701

So, it may have taken 38 years, but Alan Kay must be pretty pleased that his DynaBook has finally been made real, right? Not really. In a recently published interview in Wired, Kay says:

Wired.com: Are there any particular manufacturers that you think are heading in the right direction in terms of mobile devices?

Kay: All the ones I've seen have been spotty one way or another. The only one that has paid real attention to the screen is the OLPC XO, done by Mary Lou Jepson. It is otherwise a little too big, thick, etc. The service idea on it could be better, but it at least represents an attempt to rethink service, and has a few improvements on the standards.

Oh well. Maybe we’ll have cracked it by 2048.

[Alan Kay's " A Personal Computer for Children of All Ages" paper (PDF)]