Cuis SmalltalkMaking Dynabooks Real
Alan Kay on what it would take to make a Dynabook, in a 1998 message to the Squeak mailing list.
A great email message from Alan Kay on the Dynabook. Alan is the father of Smalltalk and the idea of a Personal Computer. The Dynabook is central to Alan’s vision on how to help people learn and think better. It is still unrealized, and it is still a central inspiration for Cuis Smalltalk.
At 5:09 PM -0000 12/11/98, Jonathan A. Smith wrote:
What would it take to configure a Dynabook today, and how would it differ from the current Squeak environment?
Jonathan –
Well, I claim that I haven’t escalated the idea since its real incubation in the early days of PARC (heh heh – others might disagree …). But just having the right looking and acting HW doesn’t come close, because the Dynabook was always a “user relationship” idea.
One of the titles of an early paper was “A Dynamic Medium for Creative Thought”, and the main analogy was always to art and literature (especially of the scientific type). In another early paper, I called the computer a “metamedium” since its content was dynamic descriptions of media. The most important new powerful idea that the computer brought to art and literature (and civilization) was the ability to dynamically simulate descriptions of ideas as opposed to just stating them. This could be the basis for completely new set of end-user and human to human relationships with “powerful ideas” that would be as world changing as the analogous new properties brought by the printing press and the eventual incredible changes in world view and how we describe and argue about ideas.
So, we’ll know if we have the first Dynabook if we can make the end-user experience one of “reading and writing” about “powerful ideas” in a dynamic form, and to do this in such a way that large percentages of the bell-curve can learn how to do this. When Martin Luther was in jail and contemplating how to get the Bible directly to the “end-users” he first thought about what it would take to teach Latin to most Germans. Then he thought about the problems of translating the Bible to German. Both were difficult prospects: the latter because Germany was a collection of provinces with regional dialects, and the dialects were mostly set up for village transactions and court intrigues. Interestingly, Luther chose to “fix up” German by restructuring it to be able to handle philosophical and religious discourse. He reasoned that it would be easier to start with something that was somewhat familiar to Germans who could then be elevated, as opposed to starting with the very different and unfamiliar form of Latin. (Not the least consideration here is that Latin was seen as the language of those in power and with education, and would partly seem unattainable to many e.g. farmers, etc.)
I think Martin Luther was one of the earliest great User Interface designers – because he understood that you have to do much more than provide function to get large numbers of people to get fluent. You should always try to start with where the end-users are and then help them grow and change.
So, the Dynabook problem is not just how to get the computer to simulate media – especially those that only the computer can do – but to have the “literature” of how this is specified seem to be learnable (and then, in fact, be learnable).
(There are many deep considerations about the forms that will really do the job that are beyond the scope of this reply – and I don’t have time to get into all the issues right now – but the critical part is that symbolic descriptions are required to synergize with those that can be dealt with by hand and eye. One way to appreciate this is to think about the difficulty of doing Tom Paine’s argument against monarchy and for democracy by using stained glass windows! It is hard for many people to understand that it is the very difficulty of symbolic ways of rendering and knowing – and the surmounting of these difficulties – that makes the difference between traditional societies and the society that we live in. i.e. we aren’t an oral society with a writing system tacked on, but we think qualitatively differently about the world – this is what McLuhan meant by “the medium is the message”: our representation and idea systems are not linear to ideas, but changes allow previously unthinkable things to now be thinkable.)
Another of the many Dynabook goals has to do with another analogy to language: that children learning English are also learning the language of Shakespeare and Bertrand Russell. The difference is in years of experience about the world and its ideas, and in the architectural structuring of English to handle powerful ideas as well as mundane ones. If e.g. Squeak can show a continuity from authoring environments that 5 year-olds can use up to those that Dan Ingalls wants to use without changing language (but perhaps with different scopes and safeguards), then part of the Dynabook vision will have been realized. (i.e. Adults are pretty hopeless, and real changes come when children are introduced to new paradigms early in life.) Another “i.e.” is that things work best when they can be used for both mundane and serious purposes (imagine only being able to use language when you had something important you wanted to talk about – JIT doesn’t work for ideas!)
And, there also has to be a literature, not just a language. Over the next several years, we have to get at least 1000 dynamic examples of “21st century content” on the net. (BTW, these don’t have to be in Squeak to be useful, but one of the reasons we built Squeak was so that we at least could control our own SW destiny to realize all these Dynabook goals.) In calendar ‘99 we will be asking people interested in creating the Dynabook to help make this content (and a lot of these people are currently on the Squeak mailing list…)
This is why our project has been going on for many years. At the recent 30th anniversary celebration of Engelbart’s great demo of hyperlinking ++++, the writer Denise Caruso (who only recently found out about what Doug Engelbart was trying to do and did do) said that the thing that surprised her about the last 15 years was just how little most people were willing to settle for compared to what Engelbart and others saw could be done. I think a similar remark could be applied to our project. We aren’t willing to settle for less than what can really be done, and it has just taken quite a while to amass all the ideas and tools that are needed.
I think you can see from the above that “Squeak in a Notebook” doesn’t equal a Dynabook – but the thing that really excites me from head to toe is that Squeak is now comprehensive enough to make the original conception of the Dynabook over the next few years. Then we can just stuff that in the most reasonable HW of that time (or indeed just make the HW that is required).
Cheers to all,
Alan