The Father Of Mobile Computing Is Not Impressed

["Dave Farber" <farber () gmail com>]

Begin forwarded message:

> From: Dewayne Hendricks <dewayne () warpspeed com>
> Date: September 15, 2017 at 6:48:20 PM EDT
> To: Multiple recipients of Dewayne-Net <dewayne-net () warpspeed com>
> Subject: [Dewayne-Net] The Father Of Mobile Computing Is Not Impressed
> Reply-To: dewayne-net () warpspeed com
>
> [Note:  This item comes from friend Mike Cheponis.  DLH]
>
> The Father Of Mobile Computing Is Not Impressed
> He influenced Jobs and dreamed up a digital future designed for learning and thinking. Fifty years on, Alan Kay is 
> still waiting for his dream to come true.
> By BRIAN MERCHANT
> Sep 15 2017
> <https://www.fastcompany.com/40435064/what-alan-kay-thinks-about-the-iphone-and-technology-now>
>
> “You want to see some old media?”
>
> Alan Kay grins beneath his gray mustache and leads me through his Brentwood home. It’s a nice place with a tennis 
> court out back, but given the upper-crust Los Angeles neighborhood it sits in, it’s hardly ostentatious. He shares it 
> with his wife, Bonnie MacBird, the author and actress who penned the original script for Tron.
>
> Kay is one of the forefathers of personal computing; he’s what you can safely call a living legend. He directed a 
> research team at the legendary Xerox PARC, where he led the development of the influential programming language 
> SmallTalk, which foreshadowed the first graphical user interfaces, and the Xerox Alto, a forerunner of the personal 
> computer that predated 1984’s Apple Macintosh by 11 years (only 2,000 of the $70,000 devices were produced). Kay was 
> one of the earliest advocates, back in the days of hulking gray mainframes, for using the computer as a dynamic 
> instrument of learning and creativity. It took imagination like his to drive the computer into the public’s hands.
>
> The finest distillation of that imagination was the Dynabook, one of the most enduring conceptual artifacts of 
> Silicon Valley—a handheld computer that was powerful, dynamic, and easy enough to operate that children could use it, 
> not only to learn, but to create media and write their own applications. In 1977, Kay and his colleague Adele 
> Goldberg published “Personal Dynamic Media,” the most robust description of its intended operation.
>
> “Imagine having your own self-contained knowledge manipulator,” they implored—note the language, and the emphasis on 
> knowledge. “Suppose it had enough power to outrace your senses of sight and hearing, enough capacity to store for 
> later retrieval thousands of page-equivalents of reference materials, poems, letters, recipes, records, drawings, 
> animations, musical scores, waveforms, dynamic simulations, and anything else you would like to remember and change.”
>
> The Dynabook, which looks like an iPad with a hard keyboard, was one of the first mobile computer concepts ever put 
> forward, and perhaps the most influential. Although some of its concepts were realized in 1973 with the desktop Alto, 
> the Dynabook has since accrued the dubious distinction of being the most famous computer that never got built.
>
> I’d headed to Kay’s home in part to ask the godfather of the mobile computer how the iPhone, and a world where 2 
> billion people own smartphones, compared to what he envisioned in the ’60s and ’70s. Kay believes nothing has yet 
> been produced that fulfills the original specs for the Dynabook, including the iPhone and the iPad. In fact, mobile 
> computers, he says, have turned out to be mind-numbing consumption devices—sophisticated televisions—rather than the 
> wheels for the mind that Steve Jobs envisioned.
>
> Jobs always admired Kay, who in 1984 famously told Newsweek that the Mac was the “first personal computer worth 
> criticizing.” Just before Kay was fired from his first stint at Apple in the ’80s, Jobs had been pushing an effort to 
> get the Dynabook built in Cupertino. The two would talk on the phone every couple of months until Steve’s passing, 
> and Jobs invited him to the unveiling of the iPhone in January, 2007.
>
> Last year, during the course of my reporting of my book about the iPhone, The One Device, we sat for a lengthy 
> interview—what follows is an edited version of that conversation.
>
> [snip]
>
> Dewayne-Net RSS Feed: http://dewaynenet.wordpress.com/feed/
> Twitter: https://twitter.com/wa8dzp



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