Instructor Wrap Up - Personal Dynamic Media - Kay and Goldberg

I'm not going to go into too much detail about the Kay and Goldberg piece because it was a fairly easy read.

The introduction to this piece brought up some very good ideas, and explained some pertinent things to the article.  A couple of things to read over are NeXT, Dynabook , PARC, Smalltalk Language, and the Squeak project. Briefly reading through these links will give you further understanding about the reading.

Page 393 covers what the article is about.  It says, "In it, we explain the Dynabook idea, and describe a variety of systems we have already written in Smalltalk language in order to give broad images of the kinds of information-related tools that might represent the kernel of a personal computing medium".

Here are some additional quotes I liked for various reasons:
Pg. 393 - "Although thinking goes on in one's head, external media serve to materialize thoughts and, through feedback, to augment the actual paths the thinking follows."

Pg. 394 - "Imagine having your own self-contained knowledge manipulator in a portable package the size and shape of an ordinary notebook.  Suppose it had enough power to outrace your sense of sight and hearing, enough capacity to store for later retrieval thousands of page-equivalents of reference materials, poems, letters, recipes, records, drawings, animations, musical scores, waveforms, dynamic simulations, and anything else you would like to remember and change."

Pg. 394 - "If the 'medium is the message', then the message of low-bandwidth timesharing is 'blah'".  Holy cow - I love love love this quote!

Pg 395 - "Different fonts create different moods and cast an aura that influences the subjective style of both writing and reading."

Pg. 396 - I loved all of the conclusion section, but this really takes the cake:  "For educators, the Dynabook could be a new world limited only by their imagination and ingenuity".  The only thing I will say about this quote is that I completely and wholeheartedly agree.  I'm using my 'Dynabook' to type out this blog post.  But I digress......

The way the article is set up is kind of neat.  It starts out with the editors introduction, then proceeds to the authors introduction.  It then covers the following sections:
*Background: Humans and Media
*A Dynamic Medium for Creative Thought: The Dynabook
*Design Background
*An Interim Dynabook
*Remembering, Seeing and Hearing
*Different Fonts for Different Effects
*Editing
*Filing
*Drawing/Painting
*Animation and Music
*Simulation
*An Animation System Programmed by Animators
*A Drawing and Painting System Programmed by a Child
*A Hospital Simulation Programmed by a Decision-Theorist
*An Audio Animation System Programmed by Musicians
*A Musical Score Capture System Programmed by a Musician
*Electronic Circuit Design by a High School Student
*Conclusion

Most of these sections were very interesting to read, especially since the article was written in the late 1970's (around the time I was born, so it was interesting to read about 'new innovations' at this time).  But one of the other sections stood out to me: A Hospital Simulation Programmed by a Decision-Theorist .  This section struck me as interesting because the small town I live in has a health center that is switching over to an electronic charting system.  They have spent quite a bit of money installing this system that can easily network with other systems in the area.  This idea is just now becoming widespread.

The other idea, and main focus of the article that interested me was the Dynabook.  Right after I graduated high school, I worked for a company called General Magic.  While I did very basic things at General Magic, it was interesting to see the link between this article, and the company I did some work for right out of high school.  The company has since gone under, as a lot of new media companies do, but it was intriguing to read about the company again from the perspective of historical 'new media'.

A personal note:  I vaguely remember the day that the product was finally released.  The company threw a huge party because the release date of the product kept getting pushed back incrementally, and the engineers were under a deadline.   I even more vaguely remember when the company started to lay off folks due to poor market performance.  I recall the stock prices plummeting, and depression around the company setting in. It was a hard time for the folks at General Magic.  Such is life in the 'new media' business.  :)