Michael Nielsen: Notes on the Dynabook http://mnielsen.github.io/notes/kay/dynabook.html: 'Computing as envisioned circa 1960: "The only surviving computing system paradigm seen by MIT students and faculty was that of a very large International Business Machine in a tightly sealed Computation Center: the computer not as a tool, but as a demigod."–Wesley Clark.... Alan Kay's "A Personal Computer for Children of All Ages" (1972, what I'll call “the Dynabook paper”): Many of the ideas in the Dynabook paper now appear commonplace, even banal. That's because those ideas won. At the time, this kind of thinking was a big change in perspective from computers-as-demigods. The Dynabook paper (and related work) was posing a fundamental new question: what might personal computing for everyone be? By facing squarely up to this (and some related) questions, PARC invented much of the foundation for modern personal computing...
#noted #2019-12-13
