Alan Kay Talk at 40th Anniversary of Dynabook (2008)

good

evening everyone welcome

so

glad to have you with us tonight what a big crowd this

is fantastic I don't often do

this by the way I'm John Haller the CEO of the Computer History Museum for

of you I haven't met and I don't often do this but

I really have to give a giant thanks to

our staff to get ready for tonight

because it just so happens that the victory

party for the Silicon Valley branch of the Barack

Obama for president campaign

decided to rent the Computer History Museum

for its victory party last night and so we had we

had 2,000 people partying

until 1:30 or 2 o'clock in the morning and

as many of you were I'm sure and so

I just have to say that they did a wonderful job getting

everything ready for tonight and I just have to really salute them

so there's hardly anything better than a

reunion and tonight really has the feel of a reunion and

so for all of you who are being reunited around the 40th anniversary of

the Dynabook let me just say welcome it adds great

energy to the museum and we're really happy to

you here you know I've discovered in the short time

that I've been here that people get emotional when they come to the museum and

they do it for various reasons some people get

emotional when they see a trs-80 or some people get

emotional when they see the Utah teapot and

admit when I first came to the museum I got emotional about

something too and I was very surprised about it it wasn't an object

it was a text panel and

I read something on a text panel that I had

been quoting for many many years and there

it was attributed right there on this

panel and it said the best way to influence the

future is to invent it and

it was Alan Kay of course who said

that so when I saw that I thought now that is

really fantastic and I got a little emotional about it and

the reason obviously that is so

reason we're all here tonight is that the Dynabook embodies

the very best of that kind of thinking because it

was people coming together imagining

and better future and then inventing that future through

a computer that has changed the world and

the people who are here tonight did that and

it's exactly the kind of story that the museum

enjoys telling and I heard something a

minutes ago in the cocktail party that really hit hit

because one of our trustees had Feigenbaum

was relating a conversation he'd had with someone about why

he likes the museum and he said I like it because it's

as interested in collecting people as it is in boxes

so Alan and Chuck Thacker

two people we've collected over the years because

they are both fellows here at the museum and we're

to have them with us here tonight and I want to say pay a special

tribute to them as fellows because fellows are

important when they come back and it's always great to have fellows in the

museum now there are other ways of influencing the

by inventing things and of course

that is certainly true of One Laptop Per child

and dr. Mary Lou Jepsen who is also with

us tonight o LPC has generously underwritten

tonight's program and I want to take a moment to pay

tribute to OLPC n to dr. Jepsen because there

is a very strong genetic link between the

original vision of the Dynabook and the vision that

OLPC has for well really for

the world both share a vision of how computers

can be used to help children learn both are

dedicated to instilling in children a passion

exploring the world and sharing their discoveries with each

other and although we gather tonight to

to reunite and celebrate 40 years of the Dynabook

that idea is as fresh today as

the dream of OLPC is to bring education

and computing to all the world's children it's

a big idea big ideas or the hallmark of the computing

industry and of pioneers like Alan

Kay and Chuck Thacker in particular so I want to say thank you

to OLPC for helping this night be possible and for

all you're doing to bring access to children

in the 21st century

and now

it's my pleasure to introduce our moderator for tonight

Steve Hamm of Business Week Steve is a senior writer

for the magazine I think he has the best beat in the world

because he covers innovation globalization

and leadership that's about as big as it gets he writes a

wonderful blog on Business Week com if you haven't

seen it you should and if you were here early perhaps

lucky enough to get a signed copy of the book that

he has just written called the race for perfect

inside the quest to design the ultimate

portable computer I'll bet you can guess what

he ultimate portable computer was and he's here to moderate the

event tonight so please join me in welcoming Steve

one thing that occurs

to me is that just based on the

past half hour of my life here in the museum

there are probably more people in the

audience who know more about portable computing

in the two years that I spent researching it

so I think there just said this is like a wealth of

knowledge and experience here and it's

really very impressive to see all the people who've turned out

to celebrate this anniversary

in the past few days

something remarkable happened in it wasn't

it wasn't politics

and it was it went almost totally unnoticed

but in the computer world it was something that was kind

of a silent shift what

happened was in the third quarter of this year the

number of portable portable computers sold

overtook the number of desktop

computers sold there's something that's been

anticipated for a long time as so there's no big surprise but

it is a remarkable moment and of course

at the time that that that happens just

as quickly as that happens

there's another shift that's happening this that's you know even

even Wilder which is the shift to handheld

devices and then the fact that those numbers those number

the hundreds of millions but in the billions and these

days those are computers too so it's

kind of on this anniversary it's

great to notice that and it's great to have these

panelists here two of whom are

some of the great pioneers of computing

not just portable computing but computing itself personal computing

and another who who has already made

a great name for herself for Mary Lou but I think

represents in many ways the potential of the future

portable computing and personal computing

this is

what I found as I started working on my

this been a 40-year quest its

people are possessed with this with

these ideas with with these goals of making better

and better more personal computers and

the portable computer of course is the most personal

it's with you well it could be with you

all the time now that would iPhone other things like that but it could

be with you wherever you go and it

can be a true companion so

these are the the empowering computers

now when we were talking we

were setting up this event doing our plans and we've

quipping on the phone about about things Chuck

Thacker said that the Dynabook

is the most influential machine had never built

so I think right

so in fact Allen

in the past year had been trying to build

prototype he's been working on it I think it's well along the way and I think I'll tell

you more about it when he speaks but this

the Dynabook has been

something a something of a talisman there's something about icon

for decades and it's

it's something that inventors and

engineers and designers have have looked

at and said well you know this is kind of an ideal

we can aim for and they've

worked individually and in groups

many of them anonymously they're

you know they're there there are certain lots of famous names

that we know but there are people you know I just met

a few minutes ago the

guy who is the principal designer of the note-taker

who we the first portable computer and at

Xerox PARC had never met him before and

he gave me his car keys now always a wedding photographer so

he's graduated to career

but but just great to meet him a

wonderful guy so so

we've gone from those early days

as early the early concepts the

early personal computers at Parc and then did the commercial

computers you know from the locker bowls the laptops

the handhelds and now did

the smartphones we've seen this incredible evolution

you like to call it a revolution but 40 years seems

more revolutionary than revolutionary but they've been

certainly these great leaps ahead during the time and

where we are now you can it's just amazing to think back how far

we've come and the

quest is of course very far from over

there just so many things that you can imagine that can be done with with

portable computers in the future so I'm

going to move right along and introduce Alan

very well-known guy but just a just

a few high points but here's a guy who you

know grew up in various places in

the East it's but his team years in New York City I

think some formative times in the Queensboro

Public Library he told me where did the

tremendous amount of reading and Truman you know one of

important things happened to him and his was

he did a lot of educating himself and books

were a big part of that and you

know you can see how the Dynabook vision the vision of of

a computer book that the

children could use to amplify to give

themselves to empower themselves to

to to strengthen

their ability to learn and ultimately

to assert themselves in the world you can see how

that vision came it's not just metaphor it's

more than that you know he

got his start

in in portable computing when he was at

Utah University of Utah

studying computer science worked on an

early personal computer called the Flex machine

was inspired to to

think about portable computers

when he went to Lexington mass

and visited some computers in

the classroom projects run by Seymour Papert of MIT

and on the on

the flight home from from seeing that demonstration we

got this idea of a personal computer of

computers of empowering device for children so

that's where it all started and then you can see

how that is woven through his career at

Xerox PARC later Atari

Apple Disney 8

HP and now as a

professor as an independent researcher

you know still working on computer

programming that educational programming and

while he was a you know a pioneer he's

still at it hasn't stopped and

sign of slowing down so

one of the things that I when I last

when I interviewed Alan for my book

said at the end of the little bit long interview I said so

are you pleased with the progress you've seen

in in 40 years and he said as

a utopian you know you're pleased to see

some progress along a path but also

as a utopian you're never satisfied so

I think that that is the way that you

know you want to approach life never satisfied always looking

the next thing that you can do at this great

I do

so I I've given a million talks

about the

Dynabook and children's

education and

ideas about changing the future by the way the

quote is actually the best way to predict the future is to invent

it and I think

the fact that it was misquoted in

the history museum as an important thing

to notice about history

many of us were asked to write histories

of various kinds by various organizations like

the ACM over the years I think we all

found that even trying

to tell the truth it doesn't come out right because

there are too many actual factors

and reality is messy and

the tendency is to try and turn it into a story and

the other thing is that I

think many of us have been at

least as influenced by things that we hated

in our field as those that we've

loved and you

can you can in a history you can reference something

that you love in a sentence and a

footnote but if you hate something people

expect you to justify that hate

and all of a sudden you've run out of

pages for what you started doing the thing

so so I think it's very very difficult

to actually explain

what happened in any reasonable

way but those of us who

are privileged to be the right age with

the right funders to a

person when asked about this

what actually happened we've

all said that the context was

what made us better

than we were we weren't any smarter

than anybody today but

we got a lot more done because

we were just bricks like any other bricks but

we just happened to be in the era where the arch was functioning

and in other areas the bricks

could not do more than make simple piles but

there was an organizing principle in that community

and some of the people who set up

actually understood what those organizing principles

was great about it wasn't completely accidental

so I thought to set

the stage here I would just show

you a few things that I noticed around

that time that were part of the context

leading up to this idea and

my title for this is it's the 40th

anniversary of the Dynabook idea so

the idea is actually I think

still a good idea because it wasn't with

particular reference to any kind of hardware

or software is basically a kind of a service idea and we'll see

what that that was and it's in a second

so I can tell

by the amount of reflection from

the audience from either people with white hair or

no hair

that there

are a lot of people who know what the 50s were like

by actually being there and

not even

tossed in the shape of things to come up

there because even though the movie was made

in the late 30s you could actually watch it on television

in the 50s and it featured flat

screen displays and one of the things

that was in the air in science fiction salon before the

50s but especially in the 50s

was that there were going to be flat-screen televisions

a whole host of other things

that were going to be part of what modern life was

about it was just part of the context

and then we had this great enemy

who was a bit more like us than anybody in

America wanted to admit namely

the Russians they liked gadgets too

and so this

set up this pretty good

for most of the time rivalry which

only way that funders can really respond to anything

and

so a lot of really interesting things

started happening in the 50s and especially around MIT

so a whirlwind which I think

there's a piece of whirlwind in this museum was

arguably of the

many early computers it was one of the most influential

of all times in so many ways including

its architecture it was rather like

a mini computer although it was large and

it had some of the earliest

display as you can see in

the original Earl the that circular tube

that got made into the sage console of which there's at

least one downstairs and the

light gun for pointing at things on

the display and as the processor

cycle through the display list the light gun would see

a flash of light and they could correlate it through what piece

of graphics was being drawn back then and

through a little more machinery figure

out what what you're actually pointing at so all of this

was part of this huge

complex that was called sage and

if you've ever seen a sage computer I never

saw the original q7

I've seen pictures of it but

I thought the cue thirty-two and it was enormous because

it wasn't just one computer the

sage computers were actually in pairs both

computing the same thing and when I first

was taken to see the queue 32 I thought it

was small because it looked like a pdp-10 machine

room and then I was informed that this was just the console

and

man could they build computers

then when they were really hard to build it actually

took days for the Q 32 to crash

because

it was set up to detect

errors and it

had subroutines that emulated every

instruction out of whatever instructions were left

so it had this enormous thing so it's constantly

figuring out what instructions were actually working

on the thing and then patching those in so

it took a long time to go down

so people who saw this and it

wasn't me I wasn't I was in high school when this was going on

but this made a big impression on

a lot of people and

while this gigantism was going on

people I carry

Husky U is one of the earliest computer pioneers

beloved of many of us one

of the nicest guys ever in computing as

early as 1955 he

had done the g15 and actually with

my mentor later on in graduate school dave evans

appendix and so this is the other impulse

the impulse to have a machine

that you could just sit at for hours and make

things make things happen so this impulse towards

what we call personal computers goes way back

and then

we're gonna celebrate something in

2008 it's got to be John

so this really pisses me off

that it's great they were celebrating

I'm the most trivial thing we're celebrating is this

in a couple of weeks we're going to celebrate the

anniversary of the mother of all demos that Engelbart did

up in San Francisco and that was something worth while celebrating

that was a hell of a show but 50

years ago and on either side

of it McCarthy kind of thought his way out of

pretty much every assumption

anybody had ever made about computing up to that point

and it's just shocking

when you actually

look into all the stuff that John did more deeply

and so

he looked at sage and also saw that oh

the future of computing has got to be interactive

he realized

instantly in a way that

hardly anybody has been able to realize since then

that we couldn't deal

with computer in computer terms so

right at the very dawn of this he said we have to have something like

he calls an advice taker we

have to be able to deal with computers in terms of our own common sense and

so he thought of it as an artificially

intelligent entity and we'll

see later there's another way of thinking about dealing with computers

in terms of common sense and then he

just sat down and invented the best single programming

language ever invented Lisp just

I think

it worries me about this is that Lisp is now 50

and

pound-for-pound it's

still truly impressive compared to almost anything

most programmers are programming in because they just

don't get it and then John

did something even better which he wanted to show that

wonderful new symbol manipulation language

was actually a Turing machine and

not just in a trivial way but an ax turning

machine that could realize itself in one shot and that's

what is in the air which I've always called Maxwell

equations of computing and the

philosophical leap there for people who

troubles to go through it is enormous because it gave

about programming and programming languages

and making programming language that had never been around

before etc etc so this is one

of the great years of all time in our in

our field and

introduced the the sixties in many

ways was the decade of Marshall McLuhan he'd

written one great book just on one side of

1960 and understanding media was on the other side

and was loaded

with many kinds of insights and

McLuhan had this had

this notion that our biggest problem is

we are always thinking in terms of

what we know and therefore we're

completely locked in we're

basically not thinking at all so his idea was

if you're going to try and communicate with something in some way

some idea in some language that people know you

have to do it in a way that wakes them up so use something like Zen koans

but he called them pros so

this is one of them and

here's another nice image

steering only by looking

and most

can only see the present through the past that's because

we only use what we know to think about things

but artists can see

a little of the present as it is as a construction rather

than reality and once you can see something

as a construction you can see other constructions so artists

can see a little of the future and

his nobody could understand what this meant

medium is the message and so he wrote a book

called the medium as the massage

and that

came home to more people

because what he meant is when you're dealing with any

embodiment of any idea in any kind of system

it's what you have to become to

deal with that system that actually counts the

actual things are talked about in this system

are interesting but secondary but you

have to become a different kind of person in order to be a reader you have to become a

different kind of person in order to do science and

you have to become a different kind of person in order to watch

television for 24 hours a day

all of those things to him we're much

more important than the attempts to put content on

these media and another nice line

we shape our tools and then they turn around and reshape us and

Thoreau anticipated

this by saying we become the tools of our tools

children are the messages

we send to the future and children

are actually the future we send to the future so

this

started some

interesting thoughts from people who are actually looking at computers

is more than arithmetic engined pdp-1

appeared first in 1960

prototype is at BBN n its

immediate forbearer was a machine

called the tx2 which was on the TX 0 which is a

version a kind of a version of whirlwind

and highly

influential on a number of people especially this man

known as wick because

he was a psychologist who hung a rat hung

around BBN he was consulting there and he got fascinated and

because he was not a computer person or a technical

person he knew other things

like he understood symbiosis

and he realized right away that the

computer was more than a tool because of its

active nature it could act more like a like a

helpful Cynthia and

interesting thing that pretty much only biologists know you

may know we have a hundred trillion cells in

our body which is kind of a lot of cells

but you may not know that

forty percent of those cells forty trillion of

your hundred trillion cells are bacteria

think about that for just a second

it

turns out half of the 60 trillion that are left are red

blood cells and they only lived

for about a hundred days in your body

so just percolate on that for

a second and so liq

also had a beautiful personality people

like this man and

because of that and these

ideas that he started having in

a couple of years when the space program

has moved from DoD to NASA there was money left

over and according

to the stories there was literally one

of these meetings in the cosmos Club

in Washington probably with cigars and

certainly no women around the

agenda the old boys club and they

table and somebody said well hey let's give this money to lick

and that thus was born

ARPA i pto the information processing techniques office

and because of this man the

world is completely different today because

he was wise and we can talk about these

in the panel if people are interested many

people here knew him personally and

will never forget him

also

in the early 60s the johniac

downstairs one

of the worst computers to program ever invented if

you ever looked at the order code on it

very old and slow they

were going to get rid of it at Rand and cliff

Shaw of Newell Simon and Shaw he was also a

programmer and just a pretty nifty character

spoke about two words a year

he got them to give

throwing this machine away he said give it to me and let me

do something with it and so he did the first great end user

system and you can sum up what

Joss was like in this quote of says

the acceptance of an interactive computing system

depends on the little things the hundreds and hundreds of little things in

he's one of the few people in our history who

ever taken the pains to do every single one of those hundreds

of things so anybody who ever used Joss back

then Joss couldn't do a lot but

what it did it did it perfectly and in such

a way it made you feel good to be a human being and be privileged

to actually use a computer

then on the other end we

have this crazy genius Bob

Barton who

said why are people programming a machine

code they need to program and

higher-level languages and the answer was well that they

through slowly in Bart and said well let's make a machine to

run them fast so the B 5000

was the first really serious attempt

to make a higher-level architecture and

almost every idea in it is a classic

idea and these ideas

been used over and over again and reinvented over and over again

unfortunately mostly in software today because it's

very hard to buy any piece of silicon that has

an architecture anywhere near as interesting as the

B 5,000 was

the third machine I learned 1962

another

landmark and I can't

resist just showing a little bit

of sketchpad cuz I've been doing it for as long as I've

been able to show movies

lovely thing about this was there was no actual display

on the TX - Ivan actually programmed it

using the multiple program counter feature that

it had so the basic idea just sketched

something and then he indicated at the sides there

want them all to be mutually perpendicular and you just saw sketchpad

solve that problem and now

he's going to show that it can find

other solutions of course it could have constrained to the ratios

of size also but

here the constraints always wind up with a symmetrical

rivet

and wants one that looks more like a real rivet

and

of course one rivet is not

that interesting so what

you want to be able to do is make zillions of these and

so this system not only did

real time problem solving of constraints

and gave you

the first real working graphics system but it also

had this thing that people have called object-oriented

programming so there's one rivet

that he's going to stick

into that flange there

and then he's going

to show that he can make a few more rivets

and each of these rivets is

and then he realized whoops

I got that still got those crossbars I should make those invisible

so now he's making them invisible on the

master which we would call a class today and but

lo and behold the instances feel that

so here in one year and a PhD thesis you have kind

what I would call the romance of interactive computing

so

here's my vote for the first wheel personal computer

there's one downstairs Wes

hell of a guy I

love when

the ACM asked him to write a paper about

for the history of workstations

conference he was so modest his

title was the link was early and small

the

other thing that was great about this machine was it was

a study in parsimony and

that it got a hell of a lot of function

out of almost nothing and was

set up actually as a kit that all the first links were

by the people who are going to use them they had a kind

of a summer camp they came to Lincoln labs

and they were made really for biomedical

experimentation and so the people would come and they actually

built their own link and the everybody learned how to take

care of it and took it back to their labs and

many many links were made in the 60s

so pw1

phase two if we go up to 1962

Steve Russell he

was I think here tonight I know that he's here

at this but he was down there

he is my hero

nly

30 percent for space war by putting it up here because this

is a very significant thing to happen because it got people

thinking and it was a spreadable thing

in the way that sketchpad wasn't thinking 7 70

 % Steve is my hero because here's

the guy that made the first list work and

going from McCarthy's way of thinking

about it to something would actually run

requires a very special kind of person as

special as John McCarthy but of a different kind so

Steve is one of that kind and

a little bit later is

another one of these special

there's gonna be a huge celebration

demo

I'd like to see one

I say now computer

switching that will bring in a camera picture

from the camera mounted on his console such as the

camera mounted on - I built that's

great now we're connected audio you can see

my work you can point at it and I can see your face we could talk

so bill was about billa's down

in Menlo Park and the demo was up in in San

Francisco and I always ask computer

people today how did they get sub-second response and

all of this stuff on a computer whose total

memory was the size of that picture

it's

192k picture and that's how much memory the

STS 940 had

it was a time-sharing machine it was a half MIT

24 bits and I've

only gotten gotten to correct the answer from one person over

the years who was a sophomore at UCLA and

the answer was they goddamn wanted to get sub-second response

anytime

want to get sub-second response you can get sub-second response and

the reason we don't have it today is because most

people who are making the systems don't

want it badly enough and most people who using the systems don't

realize that would help them

that's why it's this old stuff is really fun because

the people who who did this

stuff were just completely nutty as fruitcakes

in exactly the right way

you know who

another wonderful system so

the mouse was invented in 1964 but most people don't realize

the tablet the RAM tablet was also

then

move the connector out of the way so that we may draw a box in

its place

the

printing in the box is being used as commentary only

in this case oh if we

could only do with that well today isn't

it interesting so one of the simple things they did was just buffered

the recognition so you could write as

fast as you could write didn't make

you wait until it there was just almost

perfect user interface

and unlike the ankle Barb's which

had the feeling of a really beautiful tool

you have much more of a feeling

of being in a warm embrace with grail because

you're interacting with it tactically

in a way that you couldn't do

with a mouse so this is a very influential

system going on and

pdp-1 again it's kind of an epicenter for a

lot of things around 1964

Peter Deutsch who is maybe

16 at the time did an interactive

list on the PDP one that

had a number of wonderful points too it's a beautiful

machine code program but

he also realized that if you had a powerful

language like Lisp you don't need no operating system

that as

Dan Ingalls has pointed

out an operating system is just all that stuff that got left out

of the programming language you'd rather use

and you sort

confirming that if you start with the operating system so

starting with the programming language and just keep it

alive during the whole life of the of the

system and also

in that time there are just lots and

lots of things that I would

computers but there were certainly single user computers

they lack the service idea

of a personal computer but the

16:20 of course is the early 60s control de Deus

160 a I wrote some programs for that I

learned much more than I ever wanted to

know about how the 1130 worked when I was doing

my thesis project so

this idea of the utility of single user

computing was around and

65 is

when Gordon Moore wrote his day donation article the

original prediction was this green guy right here

which is a factor of two

doubling and then later

at God have banded to a factor of two doubling every 18 months

here every year every

18 months and so the reality for processors

was kind of on the doubling

every 24 months and

memories dynamic

RAM memories are kind of in between those

curves and the prediction went out to just 1995

so if you're willing to

believe this and a lot of people didn't believe

think it was relevant because his predictions were actually

for MOS process it was

really slow most people who are using

lower

scale integrated circuits we're using bipolar because they were fast

bipolar we had a lot of layers and was difficult to predict

mos was simple it was slow but

it also was essentially pumping capacitors

electrons and so it was easy to calculate how

fast things would run if you could make them smaller

university of utah started thinking

yes this is

thing that Dave this I would say was the perfect way

of characterizing the whole Arco community

ittsan Carl Hewitt down there nodding

basically nobody cared how

crazy anybody was as long as they could sing

1966 I saw this article in

the ACM about

Simula and had a stroke of

little flash of lightning because it was

programming language that was kind of like sketchpad

and it reminded me a

little bit of biology and I'll take that story

up in a little bit so

in 1967 there are rumors of a 512

bit wrong from national

semiconductor it's hard to explain to

anybody who was young today how exciting

but I

because it was really

I mean we went the Apollo guidance

system was a core rope computer

magnetic cores that actually

had wires strung through them and it looked like a basketball-sized

of mess and that

was basically to hold

the controls for the instruction

sequences so the idea of a 512 bit

wrong that you could just use for storing

various kind of controlling information was very exciting

and this guy ed Cheadle wanted to do a little

machine as he called it and so the two

of us started started working on it and this

is its self-portrait on its own display

but what it actually looked like was this as a hewlett packard

display on top of in 1130

with a whole bunch of the hardware and software that we had done

so that was very instructive

and right around that time

Butler Lampson was in full

flight doing amazing things

and it's hard to believe that in

1965 or 66 about the Lampson there's

only 23 years old because he from

my way of looking at Butler

he was always a senior guy and

a couple of years

later a guy

whose hair is now whiter than this Chuck

Thacker joined this project

and as he said he never looked back

so this is a very serious attempt

to provide a service as

a time sharing system but it was attempt to actually provide

real services to real users real early

and Minsky

huge influence back

then and for me because like Minsky was

loved Papp Ritz work

and talk about Pafford all the time and it was through Minsky

that I decided to go visit tapper

then look lighter and now Bob Taylor

as he looked back then Bob

was the third of the funders at ARPA wrote

this highly influential paper thinking

about what the computer is not as a computer but as

a medium and that fit

in very well with the way Marshall

McLuhan thought of media and

the way I was starting to think about media and

liq did

not want this network that he wanted to have worldwide

be small so he always

call it the intergalactic Network back

then because he realized that you know

engineers are human and

so if they're given a

task of a certain size they will try and meet that task

so he wanted to give them a task that

was too large for them to me in

the hopes that the result might actually scale

and so as always

talked about in these terms and liquid had this wonderful

a psychologist he knew he was not qualified

to pass judgment on goals

even make up goals so he didn't make up goals he just made up visions

and he trusted the technical people

something about that visions and oh if the funders were just like that

today because aslak

said you can't have a decent idea inside

the beltway in Washington DC so

what

you need to do is to find people outside the

Beltway to do things so

this way of thinking about things I've

been painting a picture gradually here of what

I think of as one of the dominant ways that

ARPA community thought about things is that they gradually started

thinking about things in terms of no centers

so in order to scale the networks

were interested in couldn't have a center and

the programming languages that

sketchpad didn't have a center and

the object stuff that I was thinking about didn't have a center and

object stuff that Carl Hewitt sorry think about I didn't have a center all

of these things were like these

networks of things and like biological

cells no Center so we lose

many many cells each

year and we lose every atom in our body every

7 years gets replaced even the ones in our bones

Barry Wesler is here and

Barry

was working in the ARPA eye PTO office

at that time as Taylor's

deputy and he

was also very interested in the ARPANET and making it happen it

hadn't happened yet in 68 and Barry

the youngest guy there and there was an idea that the

people who actually did the work namely the graduate students

our pair should actually have a conference of their

own it shouldn't just be the the contractors and the first

one was held at the University of Illinois in the

summer of 1968 and

whole bunch of interesting people showed up there

but we had a tour of the

University of Illinois who saw that thing remember Barry so

this is Don bit sirs first working

plasma panel display for the Plato terminal

and suddenly something that

was 50 science fiction was but yet only

an inch square was actually working and could

display the University

of Illinois on it so it

was going to happen we started talking about gee

maybe a little desktop computer like the Flex machine could go on

the back of one of these lasting displays someday

so here's the

the slide that involves me my

background was in bio math I did

a lot of theater and music and

basically I got

reacting to things so I saw a sketchpad and Simula

and because of the bio and the

math I thought objects

and I saw Engelbart and the

Grail system and

that

came up with this thing that didn't have a mouse but a tablet

on it that was kind of a desktop

personal computer that had cheadle and I did

and then right

about 40 years ago today maybe

40 years ago last week I went to

visit Seymour papper because I'd

started visiting people who

could be users

of a desktop computer so I was interested in

working with people who are not professional

computer users and Seymour was working the children

and I saw the following

interesting thing that

Seymour is a mathematician and

he had studied with Piaget he

should be here tonight I think many of you know the

tragic story that a couple of years

ago Seymour was in Hanoi and got run over by a motorcycle

had to have part of his brain

removed to save his life but he's not recovered

from that so this is the this

the evening that is really dedicated to this man

who has meant so much to us in every phase

of our of our lives

and our ideas in

both the professional and educational levels

and Seymour was just

a complete genius at coming up with insights

and one of

the ideas he got was children are

egocentric but in

a charming way they do everything relative

to them so if they were a coordinate system there would be an

inertial coordinate system and an

inertial coordinate system is the differential

geometry of Gauss and

if you keep track of this in the right way you actually

get the differential geometry of vectors

and in fact a child is one

of those vectors and so is a turtle and

he thought boy this is

so close to the way children already think I wonder what they

would do if we put some formalism on it and allowed them

to treat it as mathematics and so

you get a little kid and say can

you draw a circle with your body and the little kid would go like this

and you'd say to the little kid what

are you doing and the kid would say well I'm going a little

and turning a little over and over and going

a little and logo is forward and turning a

LITTLEST turn and over and over is repeat

in so if you just tell the

turtle to do that by

golly you get a circle and since those numbers

whatever numbers you throw in there you're going to get circles of

different kinds and all of a sudden you've

differential equation here that is infinitely

simpler than trying to do differential equations

of geometry and analytic geometry and a little sudden you've

got something that children can so this completely blew my mind

this is the turning point on this

idea because once you've

got something it is incredibly powerful that a child can learn

you've no longer got an

you actually have something like the printing press that's

one of the great 500-year inventions

in human history because if children can

learn these powerful ideas then you actually have a chance

of having them not just increment on what's already known they

will actually help over several

generations and bend something new and so so

that combined with just seeing

the splat panel display and all

these wise words and the clue ins in my mind on the

plane ride back to Utah from that

meeting with Seymour I drew this little cartoon

with kids out in the grass because if

make a personal computer for kids don't put it on a desk

that isn't them and so

it immediately took the fun

idea of making a flat screen computer and made it paramount

that if you're actually going to do something serious

here with regard to children you had to make

a computer that was in every way made for

a child to take

with them to do with them just as they would take a book away from

adults to learn by themselves and

because our Poe was

thinking about packet radio not just doing

a packet network back then I thought okay well

absolutely it's gonna have Wireless and

it'll have a stylus and it

will have a touchscreen and it has to have a

keyboard because the one thing we learned from Grail is either if

you have perfect character recognition it's still not fast

enough for doing bulk typing and so

all of those things coalesced in

if

somebody helped me had

this where I could find it so

I after I got back to Utah I

found a cardboard box and

started making a model of this thing that I'd

drawn and the original version of this for quite

a few years did not have this cover his cover was put

on at Xerox it was not called the Dynabook until

Xerox but

basically the ideas that had to have a removable memory

which I would have killed for one megabyte of

removable file storage back then

has a stylist

many interesting

problems on it and probably the most interesting thing we

did is you could load it up with lead shotgun pellets

make it heavier and heavier

and heavier we could even make it as heavy as some of

the portable computers today

but

back then because we weren't interested

in coping we're interested in actually what is a max

weight and the definition of

portability I came up with was well you're always

carrying something else too so something

that's portable if you can carry it and something else

at the same time and so

if you combine a thing full of lead pellets

with other things you quickly realize that two pounds is if

there's two pounds of 1968

and it's two pounds in 2000 a

period

but of course as a service

idea you don't have to do it like this

so Ivan at that very

time was working on the head-mounted display just moved from Harvard

to Utah and we thought that

actually a head mounted display with liquid crystal

would beat a large panel because of the

contamination problems that you

their area dependent on large panels Thomas nobody

was cared about these the Japanese cared

a lot about making flat screen televisions so they put

enormous amount of effort into getting yield out of those

larger displays in a saner world

the head-mounted glasses would have come the

Negro pot II had this idea that basically

the whole world is going to be networked up and

so all you need is a thing on your wrist that identifies

you to the room that you walk into and knows where you're

pointing and they actually did a pretty scarily neat version

of that in the 70s later

those ideas got attributed

to somebody else and given a different name but there's actually

originally negroponte zayed in

the seventies and again if you think of this as a service idea

right away what you're interested in asking

is what what are the actual services

so then we're almost

to the end of this little context here

les Ernest is in the crowd where

are you les yay my favorite

guy

besides being

nice guy he was willing to put up with me for a year at

Stanford when I was supposed to be working on

the hand/eye project

there but actually spent a lot of time thinking

about what it would mean to do the end user experiments

because the problem is it's not the technology

stupid basically that if you're gonna do

one of these things you have to have some understanding of the end-users

and so what I really wanted was some

portable little computers like

this or maybe like this was the kind of a thing

I sketched out at Xerox PARC and

in between Xerox PARC happened and when

I asked tailor what I should do he just said follow your instincts

and I never asked him another question

again and we just started working on it and

here's the thing in a nutshell and

we can talk later about why there isn't a Dynabook

today if you want but basically it came down

to four things that besides

all the media stuff that were obvious and simple

to do in emulating regular books and doing

television and animation and all that stuff there

are four four things we have to learn about

what powerful ideas were and how

they could be learned we're interested

in whether computers could aid as Patrick

had

shown us we

needed to understand how

this could work with human mentors teachers and parents and

I was most interested in

whether you could make computer mentors to

do this because my confidence

in adults was very low back then

and it still is basically

the biggest bottleneck in all forms of education

today and especially all forms of educational reform

are the adults that are in the system

and many in the third

world it's the lack of adults

but in our world is almost the lack

of adults almost no elementary school teachers understand

anything about math and science and so in

a way things might even be better if they weren't there

because the children would not be getting

misinformation about it so these

were the four parts and the idea that whatever

it is it's like reading and writing so it has to succeed for

over 90% of the children not for the 10% who

are set up by nature to be good at it and

of course the problem with technologists doing is we were all set up by

nature to be in that 10% that were good at all of

us learn to program in a week I'll bet you anything

it's not that hard if you

almost know what it is and if you don't almost

know what it is it could be really daunting for people

and this is why computer people generally design

terrible computer interfaces because they

are so they're not only willing to

cope with something bad they're pleased to

because it's a little challenge for

them

okay so at Xerox

we had this HP 35 calculator

which I only had for two weeks because it was

tolen cost a lot

of money and after

crying about it for a day I was happy because I realized

this is the first time I've ever seen a computer that

somebody could actually steal

and

so Butler

instigated and Bill English and others

instigated a thing called the old character

generator that

to try and understand what it would be like to make

readable things on a computer display and by

character generator we actually made a bitmap

memory that

allowed painting and other kinds of animations and

be done and so this was kind of the first bitmap

memory and what it looked like and

so one of the things that happened in 1972

is a lot of things that were

being thought about got simulated using

very expensive equipment like this old character generator data

general Nova computers and so forth so

a lot was known about what animation

was going to be like and what music was going

to be like and and so forth

and now we're just about to the end of the story here

because we're starting to take

that was an idea and is still an idea and

in a way ideas on account

for a little in computing because you

kind of have to implement the stuff this is

part of the story that really makes me plush up my throat

because every time you implement something you five

years go away and you

do learn something so but

the important part here is that the

kind of the super basketball team the

super sports team that's a real Research Center has people of every different

kind of temperament and when

they can work together you get this enormous synergy

of talents and we have a

couple here tonight that chuck was

kind of the master hardware

architect at Parc made

these ideas and ideas of his ideas

of Butler's real in such

a way that we could actually try things out and Dan

made a lot of these software ideas real

in such a way that we could actually try things out and under understand

them and so I'll end this

little context by

just pointing out that whenever

we honor somebody in our community the

community we're actually honoring

every single one of us because none

of those ideas would have happened without this

incredible intellectual environment

and practical

environment to have ideas and to

bring them to life thank you very much

thanks very much Ellen

and that 15 minutes did stretch beyond here

yeah yeah I was warned about this

effect you warned me about it so

just very quickly some quick introductions if that

Chuck Thacker why don't you just

Chuck you

saw Chuck in the and the slide show in his earlier days but

he hasn't aged that much

Chuck a close

colleague of Alan's at Xerox

PARC of the project leader of the alto

computer the first personal computer

co-inventor

of Ethernet and it just it just it just

contributor

to the laser printer laser

later worked at digital's Research Center

and now works for

Microsoft Research where he helped himself as

a Cambridge lab he's now back in Pell in

Mountain View effect just across the street here and

he was the hardware designer of

Microsoft's tablet PC

which was the realization of all those years of

dreaming of pen computing and finally

getting one that got in the market and actually sold

well and proved that that idea was

more than just a concept it was actually something could be achieved and you

know when I asked Alan would

look back on the 40 years and we've gone

with this the decision of Dynabook what's the computer

that's closest to your vision didn't hesitate for a second he

said the exo computer from the one left her child

organization and Mary Lou was

who designed that computers who looks great the cheese on stage

here now she's a scientist an entrepreneur

and inventor she's concentrated on advanced

display technologies but her interests

and skills go way beyond that

zone for work with the OLPC co-founder

of the One Laptop Per child project along with with

Nicholas Negroponte and the really

there are lots of remarkable things about that machine but

I'll call out is the fact that they needed to have

a machine that was very versatile very flexible

could be and could be used in all sorts of situations lighting

situations including outdoors and

she achieved that with a display on the on the

EXO computer so we're gonna have to

little discussion here I'm gonna ask some questions hopefully

they'll be kind of like a conversation but on

your seats there are some cards we'll

time at the end for some questions from the audience and so

please pass them up to the people who

collect them and we'll get some of those answers as well so

very good

all right Chuck

that's your chance you know one

of one of the great things I thought about the the contextual

setting that how long did

was it just showed all those threads that

that kind of came together over those couple

of decades that the that

fed into his ideas invited a lot of people ideas

and there was this incredible fertile ground and

I think you know a lot of people know that it was a Xerox PARC in

the 60s it's so much of this came together we

came from you know concepts

into some technologies that were really truly personal

yeah seventy-five years yeah

so

anyway so what

was it about that time and that place that

made that possible well I think it was a it was

combination of things number one there was the

arbor community and our community I

mean you can't quite understand how how it was

in those days because it was actually possible

ssentially everybody in the field because

it wasn't all that big and ARPA

had had

generated a style of doing research

that was

really quite effective and when

Park was founded

they were fortunate us to bring in Bob Taylor to

run the computer science lab and he

knew everybody so he could pick

who he wanted and he did pick

a lot of us so it's a pity that he isn't here

tonight but he he's insist on staying upon

his skill in Woodside but

I think that yeah

it was a it was a pretty collegial enterprise

yeah there's almost kind

of a middle ground between an

academic kind of research and product developers

well no we were much much more like academics than

like product developers we really did not think

of these things as products

what we were doing was essentially the way I characterize

it we were spending a lot of money to simulate the future

and that's not the way you build a product right

now

you're at the opposite end of the spectrum we're

taking these decades of technology

and advancement all the tremendous work done by

the Japanese on displays and trying to take

that some of these machines we were looking before downstairs

there was the note taker the side next to it

cost fifty thousand dollars to make this this one device

and I think Doug said that it really wasn't quite

that much but it still a tremendous amount a

expensive computer very expensive portable computer the

first one and you've made one that where

the material cost I think is $180 so

if you and and

but in a very collaborative kind

environment so if you would just talk about how you

could have you guys worked kind

of the other end of that almost like an open source

project hardware and software right mostly

some things are closed but well Allen came

and he sort of said you know here's

here's how it's got to work you know

how do you make a hundred

dollar laptop well if you look at the cost of the screen it's more

than a hundred dollars and so you can start

there and some Nicholas had started with a kind

of a science project projector and I looked

at that and I thought we got a ship the

kids are still kids were there it's about sin

so that really bounded the project and so we

just were able to bring in all sorts of people from all

you know this was the chance we had

a chance to everybody

came to the project had a chance to use their skills

in a way not just to make another product but

this product if we could pull it off could change the

world and so you think you work hard on any

product that you make but this product you don't stay

up just one night two nights three nights you know just

don't sleep for two years and I think that was the

the effort of a large number of

extraordinary individuals that that came

together to make it happen a lot of lots of different

ideas yeah but but a focus when we got to

ship this it's got actually work no no

yeah and I knew well you you

clearly had a goal in terms of that kind of a hardware

spec kind of goal and price kind of goal but

the but the but the main thing that was driving you was this desire

to make an affordable and flexible computer

for children I have a dramatic impact on that

certainly that was what was been driving

Alan all these years how did that

kind of inform your engineering and

design decisions well

you know a lot

of people thought it was impossible but if you looked

at the cost of you know super low cost CPUs they

were available a lot of people

came to the project AMD came to the project and and

really put forward a

lot of companies put forward extraordinary price points

and if you looked at you

know the cost of Wi-Fi and come-come way down stuck

with a screen problem of that being a hundred bucks so

we had I designed a new screen in convince

manufacturers to

but really the way we did it

was to not start with the engineering to

really just think about it a long time

a lot of thought a lot of going out talking to

the countries convincing them that

that they they believed us that we could

low-cost laptop and they said wow if he can do that why

don't you come and talk to the press I'll buy two million

of them and the president Lula da Silva did that first in

Brazil and we went actually back to the

US after that and got

calls from every other head of state in Latin America saying you

know we were thinking you know when a

lot of it was sort of getting

the groundswell in the the

different heads of state throughout the world

to say they would buy these laptops if they existed where

when the manufacturers heard that they could fill

their factories with this kind of volume they

were interested and so we thought we'd

pick a country in Latin America a country in Africa a

Middle East a country in Southeast Asia and so forth

but when we took Brazil on as

our country in Latin America

every other head of state in Latin America called us

and said how can Brazil possibly represent us

they

don't even speak Spanish

that's a good point

okay

that's right they do rot in and so

that just shut I think almost after the UN summit

on the digital divide where Kofi Annan unveiled

our functional tethered prototype

Allen was there and convinced

us to actually have a motherboard underneath the table

I think every head of state except for Miramar

North Korea and Belgium had essentially

signed on to the project that was enough to

convince the manufacturers to work with us so they

so the the XO was the closest thing to your

vision of the Dynabook but the

data book is the you know the the computer

built the idea that was never built so why was

it never built in spite of all these people

really trying very hard to make

it happen well I think

you know in spite of the fact that I

have a cardboard model and

drew pictures of it as

I said to me it was a service idea

and the four

things that I put up in one of those

slides near the end so we have to learn what

our powerful ideas are and how to learn them how computers

could help learn them what kind

of mentoring can be done by humans and

to do my computer

those are the four things and

just working on the first two

with our 90%

success threshold for children led

to 25 years of

failure because we

were paying for this research ourself

nobody would actually fund the children's

research because we did these long projects

and we

didn't believe in most forms of the testing that are reported

in educational literature and stuff so we wanted

to actually convince ourselves that children were

getting fluent and that 90% of them were getting fluid

so by those criteria it was just one failure

after another and but

basically after each one of these which would last

five to ten years depending on the

effort we've learned something and about 10

years ago one of the systems that we did

started touching many more

children with adult health in

a much stronger way and so

I think it's safe to say after 40 years the first

two ideas

and a little bit about what kind of human mentoring

you need have been solved of the three things

but boy when Nicholas started

up the OLPC project my heart sunk

even

as I supported it because

mentoring if it's tough

to get good human mentors in the United States it is really

tough out in the third world and so

for instance there doesn't exist today

even the simplest

program like

interface that's in common use today can even find

out what its user is and what its user

knows and what it can do or just the simplest things

it can't find out what level of reading the

user do and help them do the next level of reading

so if you think about the the

common sense version of we did of McCarthy's idea

of what you needed for a common sense was the

common sense of using the world so we

made a relatively we made a world populated

with objects that reacted to what humans did

but they didn't interact very strongly whereas

that isn't enough pure discovery

learning took us a hundred thousand years to get to

science and so you actually need

learning that is actually facilitated

and if you can't make a

thousand good teachers in a year to save

yourself you have to have a user interface that can do that

to me that is and actually Danny Barbaro is

here somewhere Danny was

at parking known Danny for a thousand

years and you guys were supposed

to be doing this Danny what what happened

yeah

you can't don't evolve it

invent it no but so the

this this dream of having a user

interface that could facilitate is

as old as artificial intelligence that's

why I brought it up it is artificial

but you know you could say robot

yeah but what I'm saying is is that the

to me that was the thing we

would have worked on it if we'd had even one good idea but

I've never had a good AI idea in my entire career

and so it's a different temperament

a different kind of person and my thought was eventually

they'll catch up at the past and we'll

be able to actually make up for no teachers and

make up for bad teachers at least we'll probably never do as

well as a good teacher but we should

be able to do something and so when the OLPC project

started thinking oh my god we

are lacking the one piece of the technology

like if we could just ship that

with a simple program that would teach the children to learn how

to in their native language that would be the killer

app on that machine and wouldn't have to worry about anything

else for a number of years but that

technology doesn't really exist yes

I know everybody has it's like

it's like in the old days the

rule was everybody can make a one-inch

square flat panel display and nobody can make a 5 inch

square one still

be so I'm just saying that it's it's

that gap I believe that has to be bridged in

order to fulfill the educational goals that the Dynabook has if

you have to have some way of getting around the adults in

the system that make educational reform difficult

hat's

happening I mean here's the here's the day that prude

didn't believe that the kids could learn how to use the laptops

themselves they did a couple pilots and Peru

measured themselves on a World Economic Forum study

of primary school education throughout the world

142 countries participated in a study Peru

came 140 second dead

last but they said well you know at least we have a baseline

there are more than 200 countries in

world and so you know we're not that bad so they got

the laptops they're in primary

school education 15 1 5

of the children could pass reading comprehension tests

at grade level and in the schools we

put the OLPC xo1 to zero

percent of the children could pass reading comprehension

tests at grade level and they have

they have scores three two one or zero this

three is passing to is almost passing one

and zero are self explanatory we

went into schools where zero percent of the children

could pass at grade three and they were all zeros

or ones six months with the laptops

30 percent of the children got

grade passed at the reading comprehension at

grade level of at three forty percent

of the got scores of two and the

rest were heroes one that was incredible and

that wasn't perfect they could learn how to read and

it was a testing data we

didn't actually expect this as a result

in fact we were sort of saying all while testing teaches the

test let's not do that but that was enough to convince Peru

to buy four hundred thousand laptops and really deploy

them across the country so it's working

somehow we don't understand how but

you know when Nicolas started this project I said to

him if nothing else it's likely

to make this a topic of conversation

now to actually bring the idea of a children's computer

topic and if you can get a bunch of other companies trying

to compete with you in doing it that

will be a wonderful result of

the oil PC because that kind

of competition is very

often healthy for the genre and

I think there are at least seven

vendors now they're making machines

that they claim or aimed at children one way or

another and are less expensive and

the stuff that powers education

is the software that can ride on these machines

and so just like laptops became a category after

awhile I think more and more people are

thinking about this who maybe not have

children's best interests in mind but just think of it as another marketing

area that draw it can drive some good things

and so I believe this whole thing

is a step forward and

I still think there's a ways to go before

the thing I haven't done is escalated

the goals of the Dynabook from

back then because the of course

the the goodness of displays and

the size of the memory and the speed of the processors is far far

far beyond anything I postulated

back then but doesn't actually matter to

that makes some of these goals a little easier but

the problem is these goals are actually things

require invention and so they're only facilitated

by technology not they're not brought

forth by it automatically you

you know Xerox PARC days

through most of your career very

you know you're an academic type researcher

yet it was you and other

people bert healy by feeling

and I think also Lampson at

Microsoft Research a little bit he who made

who made the tablet happen and you know this is an incredible thing you know early

90s John doar or some of these others

who kind of whipped this excitement up around that the pen

computing also Apple I'm involved in it

really collapsed at

that time because partly because handwriting

just wasn't good enough but you guys came back

a decade later and made

it happen so so what's the thing that what

was different about a decade later that that could wasn't

just the technology resembled it's Moore's

law and that's all it all that it is and that in

1999 it was possible to build

a processor that dissipated less than five watts

it was not the geode that's in the oil

PC it was a transmitter processor and

with that and a modest modest

sized battery you could get you know essentially all day all

day life and we actually showed this machine

to Alan I took it down to Glendale when

we got the first prototype and I had

loaded squeak which was the system alan alluded to upon

it and Dan Ingalls grabbed it out of my hand

started running a benchmark and he said this is a fast computer

and I said yeah that's a pretty fast computer

that prototype is nicer than any

of this commercial versions

and

yes handwriting recognition is

bad but you can do exactly the trick that that Alan alluded

to in the talk you don't do the recognition initially

you do it in a background thread and and you fire

off strokes as you get them and it all works just

fine I have built that system unfortunately you

can't quite get it on on

the current tablet PCs but I think

we're getting there and there are some fine

new pieces of silicon out there in the world

ideas are so easy because

they have no mass and they're not affected by gravity

right exactly

we

have several questions here talked

about here question was what hardware limitations

still remains whether

the battery life that would you most like to see overcome

well the the problem that

I see in these devices for children is

that you would that you would really think of very much

its ruggedness and I guarantee

you that if you drop one of these things

it will break

well I actually know a

small company in in Palo Alto that

I like I got to design a thing that was we've

actually looked at this idea too about how to build low-cost

computers for children and and yes

we came up with a number 185 dollars to

but

the I was very worried about the ruggedness

of the liquid crystal displays now you could make them out of plastic

but that's you know that's a tough thing to do right

now manufacturers much rather make

of glass and the problem is when they make it they build

incredible stresses into it and so if you drop

it and it means a little bit then you got a stress

crack propagating right through the cover plate and I've

I've broken laptops displays and

probably many of you have too and we could not

tolerate that in a machine that's going to be used by children because

children use their their

school objects for many different purposes including

as weapons fact

one of the things we did it at Utah with

the cardboard because when I was a kid we used to

hit waiting for the school bus we used to hit baseballs with our

schoolbooks yep exactly so 700

G's we tested the exo

for that and five foot shocks

well I I was

interested in this question and

so I went and I Ivan I'm not

a mechanical engineer so I I went and hired one and

they built one for me that

was they used

some secret sauce but they called me up a couple of days later

and they said Chuck were not going

to be able to get the drop tests finished

time we said and I said what's the matter and he said well

the idea here was this machine unlike the XO has

a case that is an integral shock

control thing the case is actually made out of an elastomer

and the

display is supported in such a way that it can't bend

or without adding hundreds of G's

and

they said well the problem is every time we drop it from a

nut from an altitude of a foot higher we have to

take it all apart because it gotta live it up and we got to look at the display

carefully magnifiers to see if it's broken and

he said and we're up to ten feet and we're out of a light out

of ladders so if you need

a highly ruggedized laptop I know someone

who knows how to make it my

research the first think pad was

actually a tablet and it was made for

with the idea of field service you know

technicians and things like this and also insurance

adjusters oh yeah when we got into the

tablet business we knew immediately that we were going to

get 200,000 units a year and that was quite

predictable because all the previous tablets

had the resistive digitizers would go over to a more standard

thing and they all have this Atlantic

thought that they so they I think it was nation

something the adjustments would take you things on the field and

the first thing they would do when they wanted

of kneel down and write something as they would put they

would actually put the computer down and kneel on it

so

they busted a bunch of screens that way you

know I wanted to ask me you know you're you're doing a lot of work with

is place now that's really I understand the focus

of pixel Qi so what's your

vision of what you've wait where you can take the the work you

with the XO and One Laptop show what were you taking

that now it goes back to

the question that was just asked neglecting power consumption

that is the thing that we care about is battery life and

it feeds into everything

it feeds into robustness it feeds into use K feeds

into the fan noise everything and so in the

limit I just

think why is there a motherboard why is there a CPU

why isn't the laptop just a screen with it with some kind

wireless and cloud computing so physically all the circuitry

is in the screen your time or in the

so what what

we're focused on is really

trying the screen is by far

the most expensive part of a portable

and the most power hungry and the second most

expensive part of a portable is the battery

and so if you want to

to work better portables I think

somebody's got

and I think most

people when they're designing hardware don't even consider

this screen really part of the hardware

anymore so anyway I know a lot about screens

and I've convinced the LCD manufacturers

to work with me we're working with about 30% of the worldwide

LCD capacity sort of saying you know it's

kind of like CMOS TFT

LCD if you want there's all these sort of visions

of the future and display as well and

very few of them get into mass production

when they even starts a sample

that the patents have expired and I think it's

like 20-30 years ago face it CMOS one forget

the silicon and Sapphire gallium arsenide very good for

niche stuff but if you want to

make stuff that actually ships you

know there are six masks on top of an amorphous

is amorphous silicon you can make things so we're

focused on that making sunlight-readable splays displays

from reading things like that but

the XO is the first part of that it's

the only sunlight readable screen in a laptop right

now it's also a 1 watt laptop the

laptop battery lasts for 20 hours and

we made it for yeah poor kids

in the developing world but you guys can all buy

one starting November 17th and they give one get one program

sorry I had to plug it but um

you know you can get one too if

you if you buy two you have to give one to a kid in a

refugee camp but you can get one it's left

discussion

is the

computer as a as a empowering device for children

we don't have too many children in the audience today

but there must be but there must have been

at least one because this one

says though you may not have noticed there is representation

from the younger generation in the audience where

oh you left okay

all right so they went to bed so here's the question having

seen the whole spectrum of computing so far what is your

message to the younger generation

learn everything you can

forget it and just smell the perfume

that you have

to learn everything you can but

you can't take it first order seriously

in order to think you

has it has to be there where you can draw on it rather than it running

you around I think that the secret

of getting educated is

being able to use the knowledge rather than

having the knowledge use you that's that's the

and one of the biggest problems with a lot

of the youngsters doing computing today it's they turned

it into more like a pop culture where

and I've said to them on many occasions

is you could very well be smarter than the smartest person

back in the 60s and the 70s but you're not smarter

than a hundred of them and the 16 the 7

is very interesting because that was where aggregates

of very smart people in 20s 30s

and a hundreds did things

that no single smart person could

o and they did things of a different kind than most

of the stuff that's being done in computing today which

i think is hugely incremental and

there are some even some good reasons for the incremental

ISM but a lot of the incrementalism is just

because people are more interested in novelty

actually in getting above

some important threshold and the way to get beyond

novelty like Cicero said

the person who knows only his own generation remains

forever a child so

the way to get out out of that and I I would

say one of the things that was interesting about that time Chuck

can comment but cool thing was you couldn't get an

undergraduate degree in computing back then it was

so good you had to learn

something and

so everybody in

the ARPA community had gotten an undergraduate degree or master's

degree or some of them even PhDs or or not

but basically they had mastered something that was an

existing discipline that was really hard where the thresholds

were very strict and didn't matter where there was physics like with

Butler electrical engineering or mathematics and

everybody had a I think a really good

detector for what was

just playing what was just a or guitar in computing

uitar

hero machines including in Microsoft Research

I notice now yes yeah oh yeah this is one

outside very close to your office could be alright

look like you were about to say something what's your message well

young people I

outside I'm not sure exactly I would give this man

one of the things that I've that I'm very

worried about is that there

are a couple things that are happening in our society

this is this is an interesting

thing I've been trying to fact out my wife told me this that

had read somewhere that there was a study done of the

vocabulary of graduates she fought from middle

but it might have been from grammar school in

about 2008

now and

20 years ago and the answer was

that the vocabularies of kids have dropped

substantially more

so than then I think you could you

could account

for you know people just aren't getting are

you know we're not putting anything in the water but

we also see you know there's a rise with things

like attention deficit disorder and

a lot of that I think comes from

things like television

we did a lot of study on

how to help use computers to

help kids learn how to read and we

finally decided that the only thing that we

could possibly do that might work and

and this is in the u.s.

now this is not in Peru where they maybe want

it's

in the US where they would much rather watch television the

only thing that we could possibly figure that would

rag the kid away from the television when their parents weren't

there because that's the norm now

and it wasn't 40 or 50 years ago is use

videogames and so we tried to develop a

system that combined both good pedagogy and

an experience that the kid would actually enjoy we

failed but when

I told Alan that we were doing this kind of thing he said he

you're gonna try to teach kids to read and I said yeah and he said I'd

never do that it's way too hard and he was right

you know I one

of the messages I would give to young people is

on occasion and maybe frequently

leave your computer behind and just go for a walk and

and don't plug your iPhone in your ears either just

like start to have some some sensory experiences

with the world around you how

many of you are without your iPod

right now

without

and

this is an audience filled of filled

with the elderly and only I don't

have them I don't have one like and to

think you used to be one day

I

was only here for about one year 1968

last word

generation

it reminds me of this is very short story but

I was with Alan and Nicholas and in Tunisia northern

Africa a couple years ago and after

a grueling week we went to a Roman

ruins and dukkha and Alan

pointed to this rot in the road

that had been made by the carriage is being pulled over

the road for centuries and said he'd

buy lunch for anybody that could say

what the rut in the road was and I

was I'm tired I don't know it give up

but what's the name of the

rut in the Rhode Island the rut

in the road which is actually not worn by chariots for centuries

but was cut there for the chariots

is curriculum

that

is where our modern and you can look at

it as a bad thing and is a good thing you

know basically it meant the way towards

where you're trying to go the path that you take

to get there that's what it was and it came from

that rut in the road which by the way was

interestingly reversed and became

if you measure some of the ones that error then roman

ruins you'll find the gauges of some of the railroads

in Europe are exactly that with

try

to take that story I'm suggesting

just a few quick things to close up

Ellen I got a text from Cicero

he said you didn't quite have that quote right but

we're going to have it checked and

in the interest of protecting the

museum's reputation at the expense of my own let

me just say I blew the quote it's right downstairs

and I just want to

Cicero quote I was trying to

modernize it and remove gender from it

okay

only his own generation

remains forever a child that's great

that's fantastic let's

let me just the Steve Allen had the very good suggestion

that everybody who was involved with the Dynamo project at

ARPA Park everybody who was involved in ARPA and

Park in the audience okay please

stand up so we can recognize you

wonderful thank

second

Steve's book is going to be on sale in the

lobby at the front desk afterwards so please

check that out I want to invite you on Thursday

November 20th if you can make it to one of our lunch

hail to the historian series Steve

Blank talking about secrets of Silicon Valley so

if you can make that we'd really love to have you and please join me in thanking

everyone who is involved tonight Alan

shock Mary Lewis Lee thank you very much

ave a safe trip home everyone