©Mark Ollig
Recently, I watched a video showing two people
seated at an outdoor patio table, enjoying brunch at a downtown café.
They both took turns reading an electronic newspaper
using a flat-screened computing tablet.
Every so often, the video showed a person tapping an
interactive graphical element of the display screen with a stylus pen to
display the content of a news story, or advertisement.
This video was recorded 25 years ago.
The first iPad wouldn’t be seen for the next 16
years.
In 1994, Roger Fidler, a journalist and newspaper
designer, recorded this video, demonstrating (with a prototype) how a person
would use a portable computing device to read, interact with, and share the
news and information from a digital tablet newspaper.
“It may be difficult to conceptualize the idea of
digital paper, but in fact, we believe that’s what’s going to happen,” Fidler
said in 1994.
He was describing the electronic newspaper of the
future, which was being read and interacted with on a digital device he called
The Tablet.
From 1966 to 1969, the television series “Star Trek”
would occasionally show a scene with crew members obtaining information from
rectangular electronic clipboards with a flat display screen operated by using
a stylus pen.
In the late 1980s, the television series, “Star
Trek: The Next Generation,” showed crew members using what was called a PADD,
or Personal Access Display Device.
The PADD was a portable handheld device closely
resembled today’s mobile communication devices, like an iPhone or Galaxy 9.
One of the first well-thought-out concepts for an
educational handheld tablet computer was conceived during the late 1960s by
Alan C. Kay, a computer scientist working at the Xerox Palo Alto Research
Center.
Kay named his portable educational tablet computer
concept the DynaBook.
It was designed to be a “carry anywhere” tablet
personal computer intended for student educational learning and information
gathering.
While in third grade during the late 1960s, I
remember studying extra hard to correctly answer the multiplication questions
on the flash cards my mother would quiz me on.
There were a couple of reasons for this.
Mostly, because I would be denied watching the next
television episode of “Lost in Space” until I correctly answered the questions.
I also needed to pass my third grade teacher’s (Mrs.
Seymour) multiplication times-tables test.
But, I digress.
By August 1972, Kay completed his description of the
DynaBook in a document called “A Personal Computer for Children of All Ages.”
“Although it should be read as science fiction,
current trends in miniaturization and price reduction almost guarantee that
many of the notions discussed will actually happen in the near future,” wrote
Kay at the start of his book.
In this document, Kay presents several scenarios
demonstrating how the DynaBook would be used; these scenarios are incredibly
accurate, describing how portable computing devices are used in schools today.
Kay suggests the DynaBook personal computer may have
no keyboard at all, saying “the display panel would cover the full extent of
the notebook surface.”
He describes its keyboard as being “as thin as
possible . . . it may have no moving parts at all – but be sensitive to
pressure.”
Kay is describing the use of tactile screen sensors,
which is how we extract and input information into tablet computers and
smartphones.
The hand-drawn DynaBook is comparable to today’s
tablet computing devices.
A touch-sensitive keyboard was stationed along the
bottom of the tablet; the document he wrote describes a user operating the
“multi-touch” liquid-crystal display screen.
Kay envisioned the DynaBook playing audio files,
recording voice messages, and having speech recognition.
He described the tablet device obtaining information
by connecting wirelessly to “centralized information storage units.”
Remember, Kay was writing this nearly 47 years ago.
He compared the technology of this futuristic
portable computer with paper books.
Kay wrote how paper books allowed centuries of human
knowledge to be “encapsulated and transmitted to everybody.”
He hoped the discussion of this new “active medium”
(DynaBook) would inspire “some of the excitement of thought and creation.”
Kay’s diagram of the DynaBook shows it as being
rectangular, measuring 12-inches-by-9-inches, with a depth of .75 inches, and
wireless communication resources.
The 2019 Apple iPad Pro is rectangular, features a
12.9-inch (diagonal) display screen, has a depth of .23 inches, and includes
wireless communication resources.
Today, it is commonplace to have computing tablets,
laptops, notebooks, and other smart devices used by students in a school. The
educational benefits Kay wrote about 47 years ago using a mobile tablet – his
DynaBook – have been realized.
Fidler’s vision of having a portable tablet for
electronic news retrieval has also been fulfilled.
Roger Fidler’s 1994, 13-minute video called “Tablet
Newspaper,” can be viewed here: http://tinyurl.com/4y7azs6.
“A Personal Computer for Children of All Ages,” an
11-page paper written by Alan C. Kay in 1972, can be read at
http://tinyurl.com/5zemqe.
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| The DynaBook (1994) |
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| The Tablet (1994) |
