BTW, there’s a YouTube channel with a huge vault of Alan Kay videos and related material (including a video recording of J.C.R. Licklider’s talk from the 1986 ACM history of personal workstations conference, which I haven’t come across before):
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I can see and empathise with the pain a person might feel if they believe there was, in the past, a much better way to do things, which could very nearly have come to fruition, but which seems to have been forgotten or swept away.
I’ve no doubt we could be much more productive (both in building and in using software systems) in some alternate reality where we hadn’t boxed ourselves into certain corners, and where our early education had set us off on the best course.
Honestly, I have to disagree. This is a good thing.
While I, to can lament folks lack of understanding of what they’re using, much like a mechanic can have fun with someone and their car talking about muffler bearing and blinker fluid, the bright side is that it IS being used by all of these people without a care in the world.
I think we can all appreciate the modern car: it’s safety, performance, efficiency, and reliability. A testament to evolutionary and revolutionary engineering.
I don’t open the hood of my car. I don’t change my oil. I don’t even replace the wiper blades. I am content to have the dealer do all of those things on my behalf. When a light goes on, in it goes. Fortunately I’m in a position to be able to afford using their service. But a modern car will go 100,000 miles with little more than oil, tire, and brake changes.
Amazing.
Similar with computers. Shop the internet, instant message, maybe use a word processor. The elite will use a spreadsheet.
The problem with computers today is not the computer, it’s the hostile environment of scammers and other horrible people that the computer resides in. Disconnect the machine from the internet, and it’ll beep beep boop merrily all day long. But pretty much nobody who uses a computer does not use the internet.
I am grateful at the horrors of end user programming who blindly Forrest Gump their way through getting whatever it is they want done, done with their computer. I do not critique technique, rather praise the accomplishment. It’s different, naturally, in a professional environment. But unsophisticated novice users? Knock yourselves out. Congratulations on being able to get ANYTHING accomplished on the most pig headed narrow world view contraptions devised in the history of man.
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One of the thoughts I had when I first read about the Dynabook was basically like what mspeculatrix said above. It seemed like a programmer/mathematician/logician/philosopher’s tool. Yes, a useful thing but likely less a commercial product and more a niche product. Again, code can be written to make our devices more Dynabook-like.
I too am bothered by the fact that our computing devices have become appliances instead of the fun, hackable (hardware) learning tools they were when I got into computing. But to use an expression I almost never use:
IT IS WHAT IT IS.
It’s true that almost every home computer from my favourite period would have had a keyboard and a basic. Now, every computer has a browser, and that can run JavaScript, but it’s not necessarily very accessible and it isn’t very obvious. On a phone or tablet it might be quite inaccessible. But it does allow for interpreters - be they python, or basic, or rather a few others. There’s still the question of the keyboard, and the motivation. Perhaps I could make an analogy with music: many people play an instrument, and many people don’t. Some people will say there’s no point learning to play, but most schools do include lessons. There’s something in (my) society which values the learning to play an instrument, even if it’s not universal. For me, it would be good to have the same attitude to programming. And if we all have to play on the kazoo and the swanee whistle, at least that’s something - but we shouldn’t forget that other instruments exist too, and perhaps they have some desirable qualities.
Just to reinforce what Ed is saying, knowing a bit about Alan’s personal history helps understand his vision. When he was a child he was in a school that had few students but insisted on having a full band and choir. So every single student had to learn music. That means that if you work with kids they don’t have to grow up with the same limitations as the current adults, though there are always vast forces pushing in that direction.
When the PARC people did a huge demo for the Xerox executives, these didn’t find what they were seeing very interesting. Their wives, on the other hand, as mostly ex secretaries just loved it. Things only changed when the old executive retired and were replaced with younger people who had actually touched a keyboard themselves.
In Alan’s talks he likes to make analogies with the printing press. It took some 200 years but it completely changed the world. It changed how people discussed and thought about things. It changed who were these people doing this thinking. That is what he wants to see happen with the Dynabook.
Well tell him to get off his ass and do it. People love gadgets. This should be an EASY sell. 
If not, I guess there’s always Shark Tank!
I think, to appreciate the Dynabook, we have to appreciate what it really is: a reaction to the FLEX personal workstation, described in Kay’s thesis. This was an engineer’s dream machine (in @whartung’s car analogy a powerful steam car), but a disaster in user evaluation (quite like steam cars, when it came to broader audiences). Kay’s reaction was on the one hand emphasizing a media approach, and, on the other hand, sketching up an evaluation device, where experiments with kids (especially with those at an age when they were transitioning from primary visual concepts to symbolic ones) would help finding out, what may be actually useful, without being hindered by the kind of bias found in adults. Actually, both approaches were related and interconnected. The media approach also certainly helped in providing purpose for the device. However, this was meant as a first step towards a new approach, which may be still missing.
If there was any followup work towards an “adults’ system” based on the lessons learned, it wasn’t done at PARC, but by Xerox SDD in El Segundo for the Star. (The Star, however, was meant to be used by corporate or public bureaucracy and was not addressing any means of creating software or empowering users in taking control of the machine.)
Incidentally, there’s an Alan Kay related discussion on Hacker News:
Back to - or nearer to - the question of what kinds of machines we have now, and how much better they are in some ways than the 14lb Compaq, I was reminded of the OLPC project, which hoped to produce a $100 laptop and change the world. They didn’t manage it, but they did produce a laptop (and later a tablet.) It had a number of interesting aspects:
- mesh networking
- “social” applications to collaborate with the local people on your mesh
- robust against being dropped, mildly weatherproof
- childish design in an effort to keep them in the hands of children
- readable in direct sunlight
- low power - somewhat compatible with human power and solar power
- all about learning and exploring: “OLPC emphasizes software tools for exploring and expressing, rather than instruction.”
- no desktop metaphor: “OLPC is revolutionizing the existing concept of a computer interface.”
I seem to recall a slightly clumsy Scratch - it might have been improved later. I see there’s a Python too. Of course it’s Linux underneath, and you can get a command line, and run Emacs should you wish to.
One thing they aimed for but failed at was a ‘view source’ hot key, with the intent that the source to any application was available for inspection (not sure about modification.)
I think it might have had a ‘Young Lady’s Primer’ sort of encylopedia too, but I’m not sure of that.
See the FAQ.
I think perhaps it failed partly due to Microsoft shenanigans, causing failure to close government-level deals and therefore failure to get the necessary volume.
I had high hopes for the OLPC, but now we have Pine doing their Pinebooks. They’ve come pretty close to the $99 price point.
That’s interesting… I was going to mention netbooks too, they were very nearly a thing but got clobbered, again I think by Microsoft.
But the really important aspect, for me, once the hardware exists at reasonable cost, is the software. Most software presents a pretty user-hostile interface. When you try to help someone who is unfamiliar you come to realise how many arcane and obscure things you need to know these days. (Hamburger menu? Three dots? Swipe this way?) I only know of the OLPC’s attempt to redo this, not only to be user-friendly but to be thinking educationally and socially. Pro-human and pro-social.
I bought a Toshiba Celeron Windows 10 machine a few years ago for $99 and it has been really great except for Windows insisting on putting everything on disk C (32GB internal SSD) and then not having enough space to update itself. It is shocking that you can’t buy something as nice today.
Some of the mistakes the OLPC people made were due to their funding (so a processor from AMD that got cancelled twice forcing several expensive redesigns, Fedora Linux from Red Hat that contradicted Negroponte’s claim that open source software needed less RAM than commercial OSes). The main technical people were Unix gurus so Alan couldn’t convince them to use Smalltalk - the argument was that the Python community was so much larger that it was better to go that route instead. In the end, existing Python programmers didn’t help the project and everyone who worked on it learned Python just for that.
Smalltalk did ship on the OLPC though the people in the project just ignored it. The first 2000 machine were shipped to two pilot projects in Brazil and the children found Etoys on their own and spent a lot of time on that (plus Scratch, which was also in Squeak at the time) and showed it to their teachers.
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I think, it may be time for a “new Unix” attempt (lets call it “Simplex”). It’s quite ridiculous that we have no means other than starting up a machine with a general fits all purpose, heavy lifting, time sharing server OS, which has grown overly complex over several decades.
Maybe, have an as simple as possible microkernel, an ability to select a user workspace at startup (so that the machine may be shared, no need to change users on the fly or to support more than one concurrent user, as long as the machine starts in a matter of seconds), a simple and versatile graphics and sound API, a GPIO header, and a suitable user interface, which is also part of the system API. (Make it so that any user defined object may become part of the general API for that user, like in Smalltalk or Forth.) The elephant in the room is obviously the network stack and USB, otherwise, it could be done in a few Ks. Moreover, embedded versions of most major programming languages do exists and are even available for microcontrollers. Just imagine, how a system like this may fly, even on the most modest hardware…
Edit: Obviously, there’s a conflict between simplicity and creativity, and security concerns on the other hand. Maybe, we want to have a local “tinkering mode” and a secure online mode, which allows any additional, even remote extensions to be run only in a sandboxed playground. (Another challenge poses the integration of web browsers and the resources needed to run modern JS frameworks, but this is another story. I guess, there’s no way to have both.)
Simplex sounds great to me. I run linux but have to admit, even after reading a bunch of Man pages, I still sometimes need help to diagnose an issue.
All this heay lifting is for your nice mice and touch screens and
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