My Early Life with Computers

“Personal Dynamic Media “ Alan Kay and Adele Goldberg   appeared in Computer magazine in 1977. This article adds to the conversation of Engelbart and Nelson. First the idea of Dynabook makes the computer personal not institutional. Personal for Kay and Goldberg becomes a matter of scale, that is to say size.

Reading Dwight Russell’s reminiscences emboldened me to remember my beginnings with computers.  A student got me into computers. I went to an early computer show in San Francisco. When a salesman invited me to buy a computer I tried to brush him off by saying my credit card limit was not enough to buy it. He said let me run your credit card. Much to my chagrin it was approved and I had bought my first computer. Luckily I had a church meeting after the conference and I sent my new computer home by the student and only later would I have to explain this to my wife. When colleagues were purchasing the larger Radio Shack model I was drawn to the Kaypro, so-called portable computer. The Kaypro was not as much a portable as a lug-able. The Kaypro was built by Andrew Kay, no relation to Alan Kay.

No wonder that many see this as the first imaginings of the notebook computer. I remember how excited I was when I purchased my TR S-80 Model 100 from Radio Shack.  I thought of the computer as an institutional asset that one had access to through an institutional that is college relationship that is tuition.  But once the size came down then it became personal.  The picture of the dynabook and the TR S80 Model 100 illustrate that eh early personal computer notebooks were more notebooks that dynamic media. Lance Grigsby provided the link to the end of the article.  The final paragraphs indicate a sensibility of the ethos of Nelson’s computer lib.  “The burden of system design…is transferred to the user.” This transfer tot eh user. This embodiment of computer lib is a crucial aspect of what makes  this a personal dynamic media instead of mass produced static media.

Our design strategy, then, divides the problem. The burden

of system design and specification is transferred to the user.

This approach will only work if we do a very careful and

comprehensive job of providing a general medium of communication

which will allow ordinary users to casually and

easily describe their desires for a specific tool. We must also

provide enough already-written general tools so that a user

need not start from scratch for most things she or he may

wish to do.

We have stated several specific goals. In summary, they are:

•to provide coherent, powerful examples of the use of the

Dynabook in and across subject areas;

•to study how the Dynabook can be used to help expand a

person’s visual and auditory skills;

•provide exceptional freedom of access so kids can spend a lot

of time probing for details, searching for a personal key to

understanding processes they use daily; and

•to study the unanticipated use of the Dynabook and

Smalltalk by children in all age groups.

The promise of the Dynabook is the way it anticipates not just the size of the computer, making it more personal, on a personal scale but Rob Rogers points out that Kay and Goldberg’s the end user as designer fall short.   Nonetheless, what I think provides the biggest challenge to educators is the way the Memex, Xanadu and the Dynabook transform books by putting them into these appliances. These appliance  can facilitate learning of the student designed education. Kay and Goldberg write “For educators, the Dynabook could be a new world limited only by their imagination and ingenuity.” (NMR p. 403)

Hillary Blakely describes how last week as we struggled with Nelson the idea of student, read user, designed education was a hot topic. She pointed out that Nelson worked well with motivated learners but sometimes in order to get to the motivated learner stage one must go through preliminary less joyous steps, biochem and calculus.

The seminar anxiously awaits Ivan Illich who will open up the idea of networks through the concept of learning webs more than Bush, Engelbart, Kay and Goldberg. Rob Rogers post on the missing equation as the human one anticipates some of what e will see in Illich.