I find it a bit nuts that my sister bought each of her kids an iPad. The amount of begging required for a lesser priced Nintendo which was shared with my 3 siblings and I… How sensibilities have shifted with regards to what we are willing to pay for our kid’s toys.
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Can’t believe I had to scroll this far down to see the original IBM prototype tablets.
Not in 1972, which is when that drawing was published (in the Xerox PARC technical report “Personal Dynamic Media”), and not in 1969/70 when Alan Kay conceived of the ideas behind it. The earliest home computers, the Apple II and TRS-80, didn’t appear until 1977.
Anyway, imagining a tablet computer isn’t a big deal (even though almost no one did). The bigger deal is doing the work to make that vision possible, even when you know that it’s decades away. The Xerox PARC researchers started building early prototypes of what they called the “Interim Dynabook” in the early '70s, even though they had to build their own computers (washing-machine sized minis cloned from the Data General Nova), create bit-mapped displays, design their own operating systems, design new programming languages, and build application software that an end-user might use on a tablet. They even brought middle-school kids in to see how easy the software was to use, and to program things with.
There really is a direct line from the Dynabook to the iPad. Steve Jobs and a few Apple engineers got a tour of PARC around 1980 and were blown away by the ideas, then started building their own versions of them in the form of the Lisa and Macintosh. And of course the iPhone and iPad are descendents of those computers.
(PS: Yes, Smalltalk was and is a cool language, but it was completely impractical for end-user software back in the day because the interpreter was too slow. I spent three summers as an intern writing apps in Smalltalk at Xerox in the mid-'80s; the environment only ran on $10,000+ workstation systems from Xerox and Sun, and it only really felt snappy on the ultra-expensive Xerox “Dorado” system which I believe started at $50,000. When I first used a 128k Mac I was amazed at how f**cking fast it was … because Bill Atkinson had written all the graphics in hand-tuned assembly code.)
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Yes, they were part of the group that did experimental implementations in the Green Book (free copy at http://sdmeta.gforge.inria.fr/FreeBooks/BitsOfHistory/BitsOfHistory.pdf) and of course there was the (in)famous PARC tour for Jobs etc. IIRC they ‘paid’ for that by allowing Xerox to buy some Apple shares. They also got a slightly different license, which turned out to be important later…
I think one could argue that Apple did a fair bit with Smalltalk in assorted incidental ways. Aside from actually making a Smalltalk for the Mac available to the developers club, and the obvious taking a lot of inspiration form it, they did support Alan and the team that took that initial Mac release and turned it into Squeak, then released it to the world. Now we have a serious, properly open VM and image, with high performance dynamic code generation and advanced garbage handling, so that even on a relatively lowly Pi3 you have a very viable application delivery system.
I look forward to comparing it on the Pi against Free Pascal-generated native code. 
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Around then you may well have gotten to use the first generation dynamic code generation VM, which I’m almost sure was SUN 68k only at the time. Not long after that I was working on an early ARM system with a ‘simple’ intepreter (Eliot Miranda’s BrouHaHa based) that managed very nearly the same performance as the Dorado.
That hardware became the Acorn Archimedes home desktop machine, sold for rather less than the Dorado . And a small variant of the cpu and VM became the core of the Active Book, which should have been the first retail tablet, except that AT&T bought the company and killed it. In a small irony, Apple got peripherally involved, decided they liked the ARM better than the Hobbit, which leads us to the iPad/Phone and probably ARM powered Macs in the not too distant future.
Smalltalk is a very practical language for deployment on almost any platform you can get these days. Certainly nicer to live with than any of the pretend object oriented languages.
I’m an long time Palm, Newton and Pen computer user (MS-DOS), as well as one of the original engineers for Amazon Kindle. So I’ve worked both as a user and engineer with much of this for decades now.
PS - do you guys remember when Arby’s in the bay area let customers order using a touch-sensitive monitor (IBM CRT) ?
I have a pen based portable computer which I bought second hand some years back. Its loaded with windows 3.1 and software which might be used by a telco service worker. The OS would date it to the early to mid 1990s.
A couple of years ago I bought a fancy, extra-large screen, android tab so I could read digital comics in style. It was £500. My teenage self would have recognized that my folks sometimes spent less than that on a “new” second-hand car.
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I’m so over language wars, or people complaining about how the future didn’t pick the technology they preferred. The most useable language for me has been Objective-C because the Cocoa frameworks are so good. Currently I’m using mostly C++11 because it’s the best fit for the project. I’ve also used Ruby, Python, Swift, Java, JavaScript.
A couple of years ago, I went on a long vacation with only my ipad. I got bored and purchased Codea. Haven’t really done much with it since, but it quenched my need to code. It’s based on lua.
I taught a course on Operating System Design at Brown in 1971 or so. We studied the internals of Multics, TSS, and CP-67. For the final project, I described a computer much like the Dynabook (with single-character LED displays on each key and a mouse) and had the students sketch out an OS for it. I don’t recall if I’d seen Alan Kay’s work then or not; I had visited Doug Englebart at SRI and used his mouse just before the MoaD – we were working on a hypertext system, as was he. I remember including the caveat in the assignment that the biggest problem for the device would probably be battery power.
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How sensibilities have shifted with regards to what we are willing to pay for our kid’s toys.
Or how much we value not having to deal with our own kids
I fail do see your point. “If you see a stylus, they blew it” was about stylus being necessary to simply use the device. I had a Palm - my 3rd, I think - when the iPhone came out and I actually switched from Newton to Palm a few years before that - and I can wholeheatedly agree with this.
And while I like the Apple Pencil and will probaly use it to make hand-written notes, this will probably a miniscule part of my writing.
The by far largest part of text entry I do is my keyboard. Writing, as in text intended for humans to read, too.
This is followed by dictating text or using the on-screen keyboard on my iOS devices. Though one some days I use dictation on my Apple Watch more, both for communicatoin and note-taking. Lots of short reminders one would use a piece of paper for, but with the added benefit of setting alarms. It also has become feasable to record longer rambling and have the machines produce a reasonable transcription of it, ready to be edited by keyboard later.
A stylus cames far far at the end, even below the retracatable fountain pen and notebook I usually carry on me.
Thing is, a stylus is a very primitive writing tool. It it just for pressing down real hard, first in clay, than on pressure-sensitive displays.
In the early 80s I spent a ton of time writing programs in BASIC. I think it was really valuable. (I’m not a programmer, and I never got farther than BASIC, if you don’t count a Fortran class in high school, where I learned nothing.) My 15-year-old son is on his laptop or iPhone 25 hours a day, and he has absolutely no interest in learning about programming.
Well, those were more or less just clipboards in the original series and in TNG the officers apparently needed to carry a couple of them when they wanted to lot of storage.
Not so good for writing, but a stylus is great for sketching/drawing/painting. I use a monoprice wacom-style tablet with a pressure-sensitive stylus and it’s worlds better than trying to art by smearing your finger on a trackpad or the screen.
Awww, I was all set to post another image of this exact thing.
I love that they made sure to extend them off the table so it looked like a tablet and not something built into the table.
So there you have it, something that looks even MORE like an iPad and from 1968.
If its pressure-sensitive it’s already more than the styli which were commonly in use at the time, though. Especially in mobile devices. (I still have a simple Wacom tablet from that era).
And even then, it’s better when it has tilt detection, too. In technical terms. We’ve all seen pieces of art done by finger painting on tablets which are better than what the vast majority of casual painters produce.
