If you don't know what Alan Kay did you in the past you might not
realize the modesty of his reply :-)
Those "Windows Icons Menus Pointers", the bit-mapped graphical UI,
object-oriented programming (Smalltalk), and building good computing
systems for children were put together by Alan Kay and his group at
Xerox PARC in the 1970s around the vision of the (Interim) Dynabook.
He's been working on this vision ever since.
Might I suggest these links for further reading for historical context:
<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alan_Kay>
<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dynabook>
<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Smalltalk>
<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Xerox_PARC>
A prettier reprint Kay's Personal Dynamic Media paper (that Alan
mentioned in his response) is here:
<http://www.mrl.nyu.edu/~noah/nmr/book_samples/nmr-26-kay.pdf>
In some ways one can see the OLPC as the "Dynabook Done Right" (or
perhaps just finally "done").
The Dynabook concept described what is now known as a laptop
computer or, (in some of its other iterations) a tablet PC or slate
computer with nearly eternal battery life and software aimed mostly
at giving children unlimited expression opportunities with all
digital media imaginable. Adults could also use a Dynabook from the
start, but the target audience would be children, and the software
would grow up with them.
Each time bits of the Dynabook idea escaped the lab a big chunk of
the vision was left behind. Steve Jobs saw the bitmapped UI and
refined it into his vision for the Macintosh but as he later
commented he missed the whole object-oriented programming side. He
corrected that error at NeXT Computer but rather than using Smalltalk
used Objective C as a basis for his system (that lives on today in
Cocoa in Mac OS X). Another example of premature optimization
derailing a good idea. The NeXT computer machine was more targeted at
academics rather than kids. Microsoft took a similar approach with
Windows (in all it's incarnations) but fundamentally designing a
system for business use.
The problem with all of these systems is we have put the mainframes
into laptops with rather nicer UIs. The usage model is like a
mainframe. Most importantly the programing model is more like
mainframe than a Dynabook -- held by the high priests (even for FOSS
like Linux, Apache and the like).
Alan stuck to his vision and got Smalltalk-80 updated and ported to a
lot of computers as Squeak (fortunately with the help of Apple).
<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Squeak>
My first idea when I started researching the background of the OLPC
was that this was The Dynabook and I wondered if it would be a Squeak/
Linux computer (to parallel the usage of GNU/Linux -- GNU tools on a
Linux kernel) rather than being "just another Linux" laptop. Well, it
will be a bit more general than I orriginally supposed but I'm still
interested to see how well Squeak runs on the laptop and how much it
is used in the day to day use as compared to the prebuilt (cargo-
culture?) applications.
So the HDLT is in some ways "back to the future". Now we have
hardware that is powerful enough and cheap enough to actually get
Dynabooks to lots of kids we can see what they will actually do
without the constraints placed on them by other computer systems.
This is one of the reasons I'm excited by OLPC.
"Let's just do it!" as Alan said in 1972
On Apr 7, 2006, at 12:36 PM, Alan Kay wrote:
Hi Alan --
At 12:11 PM 4/7/2006, Alan Horkan wrote:
On Thu, 6 Apr 2006, Kevin Purcell wrote:
> On Apr 5, 2006, at 8:04 PM, Jim Gettys wrote:
>
> > Kevin,
> >
> > First, to clarify a misconception: the goal of the project is
kid's
> > learning; not open source per se'. Fundamentally, this a
project to
> > help the *education* of as many children as possible.
As I recall the whole Windows Icons Menus Pointers (WIMP) idea was
intended for the kids, not as a replacement for the command line text
driven interfaces but it found a much wider audience.
Yes, but not after the low pass noisy filter of MS.
The best toys are enjoyed by children of all ages ;)
That's what I thought http://www.mprove.de/diplom/gui/Kay72a.pdf
There seem to be plenty of people interested in using OLPC in
other ways.
I'm very interested to keep watching and see how things progress.
Yes, and this is why I'm trying to base our learning environments
on the net to minimize the negative effects of particular
environmental choices.
Cheers,
Alan
--
Alan H.
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Kevin Purcell
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