The laptop’s 40th birthday, it all started with the “Dynabook”
Laptops have come a long way since their inception. From the humble beginnings of the “Dynabook” concept to the lightweight powerful notebooks we have today, the 40 years have seen their ups and downs. To celebrate 40 years of laptops, the creator of the Dynabook sat down to discuss how it all started.
Wired had the opportunity to sit down with Alan Kay, creator of the Dynabook, to pick his brain about where laptops began, and where they’re headed in the future. Kay, a former Xerox computer scientist, drew up the idea of a portable computer back in 1968, when computers still weighed over 100 pounds and used punch cards primarily. His definition of the perfect, portable computer was a very thin, highly dynamic device that weighed no more than two pounds.
Though this concept, later dubbed Dynabook, was never built, the concept lived on and became the forerunner for what we have today. Forty years later, laptops are under 2 pounds and his vision has finally been realized. “Netbooks” seem to be the ideal “Dynabook” idea: they weigh less than two pounds, are ultra portable, and cheaper overall. Kay, however, seems to disagree with the impact of the Netbook; “I’d like to think that they are finding a form factor and weight that fits human beings better, but I’m presuming that it is because many people use only a small part of what they could do on their larger machines, and much of what they do use computers for can be done through a browser or a few simple apps. So this would be somewhat similar to the limited uses of computing that fit into other even smaller devices such as phones and PDAs. If so, then this is more disappointing than something to be cheered about.”
I have to totally disagree, netbooks of some form or fashion are the future of laptop computers. With the advent of cloud-based computing, and the mobile nature of devices in general, the hardware usually associated with laptops can be eliminated, and laptops can purely focus on internet-related content. Whatever the case may be, netbook or any other laptop wouldn’t have been possible without the theories put fourth by people like Alan Kay.
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November 4th, 2008
Netbooks might become the future IF they can get to a larger screen and maintain the light weight they have now. Current laptops aren’t huge and bulky because of the apps they run, they are huge and bulky because people demand a larger screen, plus batteries just plain aren’t light. I have a 15.4″ on my Dell but I rarely ever undock it any more because I can’t carry around the 2 24″ screens it drives while docked. I’ve developed my work processes to leverage all that screen real estate and going mobile NOW is a huge compromise and productivity killer.