Personal Computing: Historic Beginnings

[Recorded: November 5, 2008]
The roots of "personal computers" - that is, machines that are not shared between users - date back to at least the late 1950s. Within a decade, several more of these "one machine, one user" computers were developed; and the idea of a user having direct control over the computer was established, at least within academia.

In 1968, young computer scientist Alan Kay gave a presentation on the FLEX Machine at a meeting of computer science graduate students and saw the first working versions of a new flat panel plasma display technology. This led to discussions about how nice it would be to (someday) place the FLEX computer itself on the back of such a display to make a notebook-sized computer.

A visit a few months later to MIT computer scientist and educator Seymour Papert and to a school with children doing advanced math with Papert's LOGO programming language, produced an epiphany in Kay. He decided to make "A Personal Computer for Children of All Ages". This was to be in the form of a compact notebook using both tablet and keyboard, a flat-screen display, GUI, and the wireless networking that defense funding agency ARPA was starting to experiment with.

This idea eventually acquired the name "Dynabook" as an homage to what the printed book has meant to civilization and learning. It is also a gesture to a future in which not just the content of "books" will be dynamic, but the relationship of people to computers will itself also change.

The founding of Xerox PARC a few years after the Dynabook concept provided support and a context for developing many of these ideas. In fact, the PARC Alto workstation was originally called "the interim Dynabook". Many of the results from this research influenced commercial computing, including the bit-mapped screen, high-quality text and graphics, overlapping windows and an icon-based GUI, desktop publishing, object-oriented programming, and many others.

In this lecture, Alan Kay first presents a historical overview of computing and technological developments that led to personal computing and influenced his thoughts on creating the Dynabook. Then Kay is joined by Charles Thacker and Mary Lou Jepsen in a panel discussion moderated by Steve Hamm of BusinessWeek magazine.

• Category

  Science & Technology

[Jerry Lames]

Excellent documentary and very interesting.

[طلال الحاج]

i hope 2 be like them

[7ai5han]

RE: approx. 37:20 -- How did they get subsecond response? They %@!#$ wanted subsecond response. Awesome. We need more of that spirit.

[CassandraAbbey]

@hazorDLX this is not the longest video in youtube. u can find videos that are even over 2 hours.

[Moryton]

I love Alan's blurb: "Ideas are so easy because they have no mass and they are not affected by gravity." @1:27:00

[Moryton]

Having followed Kay's various talks for some time, I believe the gist of it all is that; every good idea in computing had already been exhausted at the very start of computing. Instead of using these ideas (optimizing hardware for abstraction, for one), the market fragmented and followed the path of least resistance, using narrow ideas inherited from rudimentary hardware architecture. In this context, optimization has been evil. While SW gets more abstract today, the HW is getting slower.

[jjpcondor]

Magnificent insight. J. C. R. Licklider had background in physics, mathematics and psychology, and an MA in psychology was in October 1962 appointed head of the Information Processing Techniques Office at DARPA. He had convinced his associates that an all-encompassing computer network is a important concept to be developed. J. C. R. Licklider INVENTED INTERNET in DARPA.

[notbored12]

I find it disturbing that technology like GRAIL and Sketchpad just sat on the shelf and instead of being developed further for 40 years, and is basically just starting to be reinvented now.

[Jezzamezzamy]

But don't you think the more reasonable method for reducing heat would be to design more efficient processors and programs?

[journeyquest1]

One laptop per landfill. My Compaq burned up (CPU) after a little over a year. And since the cpu is part of the mo bo it would cost more to fix than it cost new. And thats just the price of the part. Laptops need better cooling capacities.

[haxorDLX]

OMG LONGEST VIDEO EVER!!!