Dynabook

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Dynabook-tablet-alan-kay.jpg

The Dynabook was created by Alan Kay. was the second head of PARC , Director of PARC

Almost everything we use now was born at PARC while he was there.

The Dynabook

He was interested in education. In how you could enable and empower kids. That's what really drove Alan. (Get manuscript from Sheldon where he told him all about it).

They didn't have the tech to build the Dynabook

So he build the Alto, the very first descktop, which became the Star System

But what alan

What kids could carry around and be a part of their life

They build models of what it would look like whith a clam shell. The models were empty and they put ball bearings and sand in it

to adjust for the right weight

then they would do a fake model of it with an adjustable frame-rates to see how it would work.

But then they ran into Optical batter -- The flickr effect.

different people see at different speeds to get to the illusion of motion in movies you need to go at least 24 frames, but the light needs to go bove that.

so they put three blades rotating to break the light up, in front of the camera. they don't see the flickr, but the interference patters between their neuro system and the frequency of the light. they have to get past the interference patterns between the frequencies. 1 in 14 people those interference patterns will trigger an epileptic attach.


The laptop computer is a direct descendant of that work.

They would break it into a series of requirements and work on different parts of it.


When everyone saw knowledge navigator that was soemthing that was really driven by the Dynabook. it was really something that fit into what kid's could handle. It was lightweght, it was easy to use, and it was virtually indestructible..

He talked about these procjtssts to many people.

Bob Stein did at Voyager, were inspired by the idea of the Dynabook.