Notes on the Dynabook
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.
Computing as envisioned in 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.
Slides by Michael
Nielsen, for a small-group discussion with people from the
Recurse Center, December
2015. The slides are brief, very rough and
incomplete working notes on a tiny, tiny slice of work related
to the Dynabook.
What we're going to do
We're going to wallow in some of the ideas around the
Dynabook. Not a collection of facts, not about mastering
particular technologies and systems. Rather, about powerful,
generative questions and principles and intuitions.
Little point in memorizing these, or treating them as
Gospel. Better to engage deeply with them, fight back with our
own ideas, mash up and collide with other powerful ideas, use
as a crucible for creation. I believe these ideas can, in
concert with others, be developed much, much further.
As Kay puts
it: The
Real Computer Revolution Hasn't Happened Yet.
To that end: this is a conversation, not a monologue. Ask
questions, point out connections, argue with me, Kay, and
everyone else. Riff, riff, riff.
No necessity to “get through everything”. The
goal is to marinate in ideas, and to distill out a changed
understanding. That takes time, since many of Kay's ideas
still appear radical today. The goal is certainly not to make
it to some notional endpoint.
An incomplete, inaccurate and unfair timeline
This is for basic orientation. Distorted,
inaccurate etc.
As We May Think, by Vannevar
Bush (1945, with multiple later versions).
Augmenting human
intellect, Douglas Engelbart (1962, at SRI)
Augmentation
Research Center (under various names, 1963-1977, when it
was sold to Tymshare). Developed
the NLS. A
high point was the
1968 Mother
of All Demos. Funding from (amongst others) Robert
Taylor.
Xerox PARC founded (1970). Robert Taylor
managed the Computer Science Laboratory (and later all of
PARC). Helped bring Alan Kay there, as well as members of the
Augmentation Research Center.
1971: Smalltalk-71 created on a bet. Key later versions
included Smalltalk-72, Smalltalk-76 and Smalltalk-80, which
Xerox shipped commerically. Ancestor of modern idea of
object-orientation (including notions such as encapsulation,
inheritance, etc), building on Lisp and Simula.
1972: Original Dynabook paper. Conceptually a precursor to
Smalltalk and the Alto. Kay and collaborators revisited this
several times.
1973: Xerox Alto: mouse-driven GUI interface with windows
(c.f. NLS). Designed by Butler Lampson and Chuck Thacker.
Used as a substrate for the Smalltalk environment. Many
iterations not just of software but of hardware too: "Interim
Dynabook". Building hardware both widened and deepened
thought about user interface.
The carrying capacity for discovery
Kay (2013): what is the carrying capacity for ideas of the
computer?... the computer is a metamedium
— it can simulate any existing media also be the basis
of media that can't exist without the computer. I was
particularly drawn to the idea of better childhood education
with the new possibilities to represent powerful ideas that
the computer brought would be a strong way to help children
"grow up thinking much better than most adults do today".
This is one of the most exciting passages I've ever read.
A variant I like even more: what is the carrying capacity for
discovery of a computer?
To the extent that we can reify (all) existing knowledge
inside systems, it then becomes possible to play with and
extend those systems.
This changes relationship we have to
knowledge: Norvig; Euclid:
The Game.
We stuff powerful ideas about the system into the
user interface; mastering the subject then becomes
(approximately) about mastering the interface. And meaningful
discovery then becomes about extending the limits of the
interface.
Building a model of oneself
Kay: an environment which... allows [a child] to gain
a model of himself is tremendously important.
What does Kay mean to gain a model of oneself?
Possibly Kay is talking about experiences which change our
self-perception:
E.g. "When I played tennis as a teenager I learnt that I
enjoyed being on a team more than working solo." [or vice
versa, it doesn't matter: the crucial point is a more
developed understanding of self]
A more sophisticated understanding of self may be: "I have the
following skills / preferences / values, and that helps me get
more out of being on a team than being solo."
To what extent does this matter? Why does it matter or not
matter? Does it matter for all people, not just children?
Building a model of oneself
To what extent does existing software help people develop a
model of themselves?
"I'm a Wikipedian." "I'm a blogger." "I'm a designer who
uses Illustrator." "I'm a [insert identity]." These are
sometimes strongly associated with developing specific traits
that people are aware of having, and which they have theories
about.
Flipside: certain business models rely on short-term user
engagement, but have negative effects on the user's long-term
welfare. The result may be self-loathing, an alienation from
and diminished model of self.
Are we building tools? Or media?
A distinction implicit in much of Kay's discussion is between building
tools versus building a medium. For instance:
What then is a personal computer? One would hope that it
would be both a medium for containing and expressing arbitrary
symbolic notions, and also a collection of useful tools for
manipulating these structures, with ways to add new tools to
the repertoire.
There's a useful distinction here.
Tools solve very specific problems.
Cut-and-paste is a tool. The lassoo is a tool. Even
something like changing the font size is a tool.
A medium, by contrast, is a platform for some broad class of
creative expression. You can imagine carrying out a
meaningful creative project within such a medium.
Photoshop is a medium. Microsoft Word is a medium. The web
browser is a medium.
The distinguishing question seems to be: can you imagine using
this program to build a significant creative project? If yes,
it's a medium. If no, it's a tool.
Tools often have specific inputs which map to specific
outputs. But media typically have generic inputs which are
transformed by the user to imagined outputs.
Tools are tremendously important. But media are the overall
environment we use to think and create. And so, to me, they
hold more overall interest.
Verbs and nouns
Kay: "We feel that a child is a “verb” rather than
a “noun”"
This point of view is in opposition to the point of view taken
by educators (or by traditional media).
We “educate” people, that is, education is
something which someone well-informed “does to”
someone who is ignorant. Those people are passive receptors,
things that are operated on by teachers.
Another point of view is that people educate themselves. The
most anyone can do is create enabling circumstances.
Even without taking a point of view on this, an interesting
thing about personal computers is that they can provide a
structured, responsive environment for individual exploration.
That's difficult in traditional classrooms. And so it creates
an interesting possibility.
In a way, Kay's "carrying capacity for ideas" has a slight
nounish flavour. "Carrying capacity for discovery" is perhaps
more fully verbed.
An interesting observation:
I'm unsurprisingly unkeen on an ageist interpretation.
Kay: For most of recorded history the interactions of
humans with their media have been primarily
nonconversational and passive... A mathematical
formulation-which may symbolize the essence of an entire
universe-once put down on paper, remains static and requires
the reader to expand its possibilities.
Consider E = mc2.
These are Unicode characters.
On paper, characters are lifeless entities. We've copied
that.
/