Interesting timing! At the Computer History Museum tonight (5 Nov 2008), they're having a talk called "The 40th Anniversary of the Dynabook" where Alan Kay, Chuck Thacker, and others will be speaking.

"I cringe every time I use a browser for many reasons. The browser people had a chance to make a more integrated UI and functionality"
Is there an expansion on why this would be a good thing? Seems to me that you don't particularly want UI and functionality to be integrated on a flexible medium like the web.

And is it me, or is it hilarious that, at a time when the whole world is watching an election that will be studied for generations to come, I'm reading about the Dynabook.

Well, I thank God for the notebok, I would be able to take a pc the the bathroom!

That is usually the way with revolutionary concepts, they are years ahed of relity

You're getting way to caught up in the hardware, the DynaBook was as much about the software as it was about the hardware. It was a vision of a computer that would allow personal mastery, where every part in the software could be inspected and changed, and combined in new and interesting ways. It was a vision of a platform where users could easily define and run simulations to gain greater insight into an area of interest, meaning it was well beyond the capabilities of dead trees.

Think of discussions about creationism and evolution. The parties could implement evolutionary algorithms and test the power of natural selection and expand their understanding of that mechanism.

Windows and Mac PCs doesn't even begin to approach this. To get a clearer idea of what Alan Kay wanted look into Squeak, Etoys and Scratch.

Sounds more like the kindle/Sony eReader/Illiad

A larger-format iPhone would be perfect - something a little smaller than a legal pad that you can browse the web on and take notes on.

@ Herb
Rather difficult to hold a legal pad sized device to your head to take calls though don't you think?

CB

Honestly, I don't want a full blown portable computer. I have a laptop yes, but when it comes to doing things truly portable (i.e. while ambulating -- read as walking), a laptop doesn't do it. A laptop is meant to be a desktop, that you can carry around with you and put down on a desk or table and continue to use as a desktop.

A truly portable computer won't have all the functionality of a full blown computer. Honestly, you aren't going to type while you ware walking, you aren't going to type while you are driving (god forbid). The most I really want a truly mobile computer to do is be comfortable to read.

In this day of the joke of the paperless society, I must honestly say that I proably print out more than 50% of what I read (I mean when it comes to genuine reading material, not printing out 50% of every webpage or reference). I don't want to sit in front of my computer reading, and I don't want to carry my realtively heavy laptop to read a book or article. Tablet PCs aren't much better, because they are really generally just laptops with reversable screens, but they are just has heavy as their desktop & laptop bound cousins.

It would be really nice if a computer would be created that was a light as the Kindle with the same realistic paper-like appearence, but have close to the same functionality as full computer. Not a full PC functionality, something similar to a PDA in capability, but with a viewable space that more easily accomadates casual reading.

I think that's really what I am getting at, that I would like to see a full size PDA. Something like the full size pda-like tablets used as reading tablets on the Star Trek: Next Gen shows (NG,DS9,Voyager).

What do you think?

Easily the most pointless thing i have read today

"The next generation of netbooks with more power efficient chipsets should easily double battery life. No question."

Except it won't. The status quo is 2.5 to 3 hours of battery life, instead they will put lighter batterys in order to reduce the weight and price.

I'm still on the fence regarding the Netbook craze. On one hand, I know getting one would be perfect for what I would need it for - sitting on the couch and browsing the web while playing my Xbox, for example. OTOH, I've heard horror stories about things like the MacBook Air not being able to handle more intense applications without severe issues. Especially with the current "make everything as flashy as possible" phase the Internet is going through, I don't want to end up with a $300 e-mail machine.

Just my $0.02.

I have a few friends who work at Apple. Originally, the MacBook Air was conceived to be a Tablet PC -- a sort of iPhone/Mac combination. However, after a few mock ups, the tablet concept was dropped for that of an ultra-light full service PC. The mock-ups proved to be too big and clumsy to be an iPhone and too hard to use to be a PC.

A few other form factors were tried such as a smaller "Netbook" sized object, but the keyboard was simply not comfortable and the screen real estate wasn't judged to be big enough. The project was enlarged with a full sized keyboard and a full sized screen. The final goal was something that could be stuffed in a standard sized messenger bag and it would be so light and thin that you wouldn't know if it was in there or not.

The closest thing to a Dynabook is the XO (OLPC) laptop. It fills in all the requirements -- not only in hardware and costs, but in software and abilities. Too bad it isn't for sale to the public. I'd gladly pay $300 for that.

I wonder if Atoms are the processor family for "the X-terminal of the future", also ... I'm using the desktop version of the MSI Wind as such w/several development machines as well as the usual browsing/email/streaming audio things, and it's more than adequate.

(the power draw is around 30 watts w/a 3.5" HD and 2 gig of RAM, incidentally)

I think the ability for elementary students to easily write working rocket model programs is not yet remotely feasible with current technology, the size of the notebook (or "netbook," whatever) not withstanding.

Right now the limiting problem is the software and usability. The fact that we have hardware that could run such software is great, but we are still missing viable software to make the Dynabook ideas a reality.

So. Maybe you should get the stackoverflow legions to fix that problem.

I'd like to know how the Transmeta cpus compare to that. Saving power was one of the main concepts they had back when they started.

Right now i'm not even sure the company is still producing cpus though...

"The status quo is 2.5 to 3 hours of battery life, instead they will put lighter batterys in order to reduce the weight and price."

Yes - the first EeePc (700) lasts around 2.5 to 3 hours (AFAIK using some Pentium Mobile CPU). Then came Atom with its much lower power draw - and the resulting machines lasted around 2.5 to 3 hours. Seeing how Asus silently switched to weaker batteries for the later EeePc700 models already (4400mAh instead of 5200mAh), they were probably glad that the Atom allowed further similar changes without loosing battery life.

I'm not sure the kill-a-watt is that accurate for what you are trying to do. If you are measuring drain from the wallwart, I'm not sure that's an accurate reflection of the power usage of the system

I would almost say that something like the forthcoming Plastic Logic reader (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=50x8h7fF4DU) would/could be closer to the DynaBook than any of the existing netbooks on the market. Current netbooks are still in the notebook form factor, where as some of the newer eReaders are really leveraging Organic User Interface (http://www.organicui.org) ideas. Interesting post though...especially since I was just at a seminar on Monday where the DynaBook was mentioned as motivation for current research in the OUI field.

http://reviews.digitaltrends.com/review/1553/toshiba-dynabook-sx-review
toshiba already makes dynabooks

@Red: Easily the most pointless thing i have read today

I bet this beats it.

Bravo Jeff, 1000 words to tell us that netbooks are useful. My pet stuffed Tigger could have told me that and I would not have wasted 5 minutes reading it. Get back to blogging about interesting and useful things before the crap outweighs the good stuff on your blog.

Was Alan Kay's vision valid and correct?

What is the time line on the "better chipsets"?

> You're getting way to caught up in the hardware, the DynaBook was as much about the software as it was about the hardware.

I agree, but the hardware problem is easier to solve. The software Alan envisioned may not even happen in our lifetimes (IMO). Some interesting links on the DynaBook software here:

http://thinkubator.ccsp.sfu.ca/Dynabook

> instead they will put lighter batterys in order to reduce the weight and price.

Quite possible -- there's a huge amount of room for them to improve, as the old 945 chipset is not even remotely power efficient relative to the Atom. It's accountable for 80% of the idle power draw!

> Get back to blogging about interesting and useful things before the crap outweighs the good stuff on your blog.

You should totally demand a refund!

The revolution will come when they find a way to make a touch screen that can be bended, imagine the possibilities. For now the laptop like devices are the imminent future.

Revolutions in CHI are all hardware driven. Unfortunately software just try to tag along.

"Apparently Kay doesn't think much of the current status quo, where you define the status quo as OS X, Windows, or Linux. I suspect much of Kay's objection to the web browser interface is the general passivity of browsing the web; bear in mind that Kay is an educator and originally intended Dynabooks as tools for children to create and explore with something like Logo. "

I'm always amused whenever Mr Kay is quoted as a interface 'expert',
have a go at his Squeak Smalltalk to see a really appalling UI, perhaps the worst readily available example of how not to interface to a computer system, current browsers are easy to use by comparision !

That's a pretty sweeping judgment on Intel's engineering of the 945GSE chipset which, by the way, was designed for the Atom and launched in Q2 2008 so is hardly "creaky old".

Typically for a software engineer you assume that the computer is primarily all about the CPU and that the chipset is just a little bit of connective tissue to the I/O that you program against. In actual fact the chipset is a highly complex chunk of functionality in its own right. The 945GSE chipset runs the MMU and memory controller, PCI bus, SATA/ATA-100 HDD ports, USB ports, audio (AC'97 and HD), 10/100 ethernet, 2D and 3D graphics and so on (check out the data sheet for the 945GSE for an idea of its complexity). Unsurprising with all that disparate functionality it's a lot harder to extract power savings than it is with a CPU.

Much of the Atom's power savings come from using a simple in-order execution strategy (as opposed to the much more complex out-of-order execution that all mainstream CPUs use these days). Most of the interesting choices that were made in the design of the Atom were around mitigating the effects of pipeline stalls that occur on a cache miss, which is the primary drawback of an in-order architecture. There simply isn't the same low hanging fruit that can be picked off in a chipset to get the same power savings.

Incidentally, the Atom is a great example of why you can't simply compare clock speeds even for CPUs that support the same instruction sets. Comparing the clock speed of an in-order CPU against an out-of-order CPU is literally like comparing apples with oranges, and that's before you consider the effect of cache sizes.

The next generation of the Atom will include an integrated memory and graphics controllers on the same chip which will undoubtably reduce overall power consumption, but don't look for the same orders of magnitude in power savings that was achieved with the CPU. Fundamentally the Atom and its chipset was designed to good enough and with 2 to 2.5 hours battery life being the norm for all laptops these days I think they hit the nail on the head.

Andrew:

http://techreport.com/articles.x/15234
--
The 945 chipset also brings unncessary power consumption. If you take a look at the Mini-ITX board Intel designed for the Atom, the heatsink configuration seems superficially normal: a tiny heatsink on the chipset and a larger one with a fan to cool the processor. But it's actually the other way around: the tiny heatsink is all that's needed to cool the Atom, while the 945 chipset requires more robust, active cooling. It seems counterintuitive that an x86 processor can sip power and run happily with the most minimal of cooling while the less complex chipset behind it is producing the lion's share of heat and drawing the majority of the power going into the machine. One wonders how much smaller still Asus might have been able to make the Eee Box if Intel had turned its engineering genius on the chipset supporting the Atom.
--

It's astonishing how power efficient the Atom is, and how UN-efficient (or perhaps a better word is "typical") the supporting chipset is.

"madse" nails it in one: "the DynaBook was as much about the software as it was about the hardware" - though I would have gone further and said it was _more_ about the software.

Being a x86 processor means very little these days, most of the current architectures "emulates" the x86 instructions using their own internal instructions.

Alan Kay's comments remind me of his time in the 1970's, when I first started learning about computers. Back then, people were saying that if we only taught kids to program, it would be nirvana.

It's the Blank Slate meme. Negroponte's been pushing the same thing with OLPC. (Kids were supposed to learn by themselves with it! No teachers!)

I'd be happy to have just a "mundane" web-browsing Netbook. I'm old fashioned and not dynamic anymore.

Jeff,

The seeming disparity in engineering genius between processor and chipset has more to do with economics than anything. Intel manufacturers many of their chipsets in depreciated fabs (hey, they've gotta make *something*), meaning that they're a couple process generations behind. Squeezing every last dime out of a fully-depreciated asset is smart business sense, even if it creates Odd Couple situations on Atom motherboards from time to time ;-)

Only notebooks or mininotebooks are not the answer, one worthy mention is the amazon kindle as well.

http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B000FI73MA/ref=kinw_dp_gy

"The closest thing to a Dynabook is the XO (OLPC) laptop. It fills in all the requirements -- not only in hardware and costs, but in software and abilities. Too bad it isn't for sale to the public. I'd gladly pay $300 for that."

You will be able to buy one from nov. 17th (if you donate one to a child as well). See http://www.amazon.com/xo

> You should totally demand a refund!

Seeing as you are making money from the blog it actually goes the other way. Posting snide comments like that is in no way productive and just makes you look as bad as the trolls.

> Posting snide comments ... makes you look as bad as the trolls.

We trolls get no respect -- no respect! <pulls at tie>

> > You should totally demand a refund!

> Seeing as you are making money from the blog it actually goes the other way. Posting snide comments like that is in no way productive and just makes you look as bad as the trolls.

I thought it was pretty funny. I think I've seen Jeff handle trolls and disgruntledites pretty well on his blog. He never gets into wars with them, just happily accepts them and moves on.

It didn't make Jeff "look as bad as the trolls" to me. So there. :)

Way back when Alan Kay was an Apple Fellow I had a neat little machine called the TRS-80-Model-100. A full scale keyboard plus a 8 by 40 LCD screen. Battery life 30 days. No hard drive or backlighting. It came with scheduling, contacts, an ASCII editor, a terminal emulator, and a version of MS BASIC. It was the BASIC that made it powerful. It became my PDA and my desk top terminal.

You tended to see or hear people using one in airports and conferences. We would share ideas and spare batteries.

At one conference 4 people went to talk to Alan Kay after his key note. We all had a M100 on us somewhere, you could tell that we really wanted was a Dynabook.

cudn't help comparing it to Amazon Kindle either

cudn't help comparing it to Amazon Kindle either

This is slighty off-topic, but hey! this is web2.0 ;-) and i have a keyboard :-P
The typically unnoticed but subtly observable property of the description of the Dynabook concept is the simplicity of the inventor's language, which stands out in stark contrast to even the comments of users discussing about contemporary notebook specifications and how these compare with the original classic.

After you read the above paragraph, some of you must have felt that I've used too many big words.

I could have stated it like this too:
Many people might miss this one - the Dynabook author actually used much simpler words than we use today for chats on netbooks.

I'll also add a "flamebait" - something for people to quarrel about.
If all important technical knowledge is re-worded in simple English, many more people will be able to use it. Not only that, translating the content into other languages will be very easy.

I have a very strong personal complaint:
Big words are a barrier to the spread of knowledge.

A few reasons cause this, among others:
1. Unnecessary use of Latin and Greek
2. -tion and -ology terms where simpler words would work equally well.
3. more than two adjectives
4. trying to pack ideas into one sentence because we do not have time to elaborate everything - the "blackbox excuse" or the "block diagram excuse" - use of a "concept-zoom pattern" is a good idea.

Examples:
polymorphism - many-faced, multi-purpose
encapsulation - boxed, inside-box and outside-box
inheritance - cloned with modifications
(Don't jump to point out the difference in meanings of 'clone' and 'inheritance', I know those things - sit back, think a bit - try to see the point I'm making.)

Most intellectuals will cry foul, scream in disgust, or call this a waste of their time. Agreed. No argument. This isn't for them.
They probably do the big thinking. Unfortunately, they use terminology/jargon heavily, and so most of their work remains out of public gaze and (gasp!) public reach.

The point I'm trying to make is that normal guys have brains too.
But they might not have the vocabulary. Learning the vocabulary is such a scary idea that they don't take it up.

This, in complex words, is "disguised intellectual discrimination amounting to virtually deliberate obfuscation of ordinary thought systems by use of verbose terminology".

In simple words, simple thoughts hidden behind big words.
Like Wall Street hid "gambling" and "betting" behind terms like "Futures", "derivatives", "products" and "investments".

Just as there is a shockingly vast divide between the quality of ends and the much-superior quality of means used to achieve those ends, there is a similar divide between the exclusiveness of terminology and the actual ideas those terms are used to explain.

In short, like economics, software engineering is math and common sense made difficult.

I don't know if this deliberate or not (hence "virtual" above), but it is bad. There must exist a middle level translation system that makes things easy to understand and without referring to dictionaries and glossaries. That's old school. Ineffective. Feudal. Cruel. Discriminatory. Baggage. Bad karma ;-)

What would it take to simplify things?
Wikipedia is a good platform. Blogs are another. But keeping on top of about 200 blogs, even via Feeds, is tough.
StackOverflow is a rocking idea. We need a SO for comp sci concepts with emphasis on simplifying words. Rewrite the books in simple language.
You will be surprised to find the kind of thinking that the "intellectual serf" class is capable of. A lot of the Masters degree holders guys out there are nothing but lucky chaps well versed with the routines of the day. They cannot invent or circumvent.
Contrarily, a lot of "n00bs" have great ideas and thinking capacity. Gaia's laws guarantee this. Think about it. Really.

I wish there were a page listing the educational qualifications of opensource programmers when they started or developed their respective famous projects. Miguel de Icaza is a good example.

No, Bill Gates is not an example of a great drop-out - he had everything going for him. That's not the demographic I'm talking of.

Kevin Warwick says that language is a hopeless tool to communicate thoughts - it's more of a barrier. Visualization is much better. And Kevin thinks direct brain-to-brain transfer is most efficient, but we should rest assured that The Matrix is far away in the future.

Any ideas about how this thing can get done?
This is, indeed, quite an intellectual challenge, but it's a smaller beast than getting Wikipdeia to where it is today, or, hopefully taking Stackoverflow to wherever it will go in a couple of years.
My two cents. YMMV.

I always thought the screen was the biggest power consumer of a laptop computer, with Wi-Fi as close second.

Also, I do not share your opinion. If you look at the dynabook design it's really nice: you have a nice big screen, and good full keyboard below it. However with those stupid Netbooks, they tried to make them look like modern laptop computers but scaled everything down. The result is a keyboard on which *you can not type normally*.

> they tried to make them look like modern laptop computers but scaled everything down. The result is a keyboard on which *you can not type normally*.

Unless you are Apple you can't runaway from industry standards.

>> You're getting way to caught up in the hardware, the DynaBook was as much about the software as it was about the hardware.

> I agree, but the hardware problem is easier to solve. The software Alan envisioned may not even happen in our lifetimes (IMO)

We nearly had it with Bill Atkinson's HyperCard but for some reason (Steve Jobs) we lost it. Maybe we could put it back together again in our lifetime?

pretty cool stuff!
maybe people would want it now..

I agree on the problems with the 945. On the (pre-Atom) EEE PCs the thermal output of the three main chips was, in order, CPU (lowest), northbridge (middle), southbridge (worst), the exact opposite of what you're get on any desktop PC. The Atom is really crippled by the 945. Maybe manufacturers could combine it with one of the much better chipsets Via has for the Eden CPU range?

>Yes - the first EeePc (700) lasts around 2.5 to 3 hours (AFAIK using
>some Pentium Mobile CPU).

Celeron ULV.

>Then came Atom with its much lower power draw - and the resulting
>machines lasted around 2.5 to 3 hours. Seeing how Asus silently
>switched to weaker batteries for the later EeePc700 models already
>(4400mAh instead of 5200mAh), they were probably glad that the Atom
>allowed further similar changes without loosing battery life.

It wasn't just the batteries (they went to 5200's in some countries after user complaints), the problem is that anything combined with 945 is still a 945.

aaa