From the Desk to the Palm
3 From the Desk to the Palm Interviews with John Ellenby, Jeff Hawkins, Bert Keely, Rob Haitani, and Dennis Boyle In the 1990s there will be millions of personal computers. They will be the size of notebooks today, have high-resolution flat-screen reflexive displays, weigh less than ten pounds, have ten to twenty times the computing and storage capacity of an Alto. Let’s call them Dynabooks. Alan Kay, 19711 Designing the laptop and the palmtop was about shrinking the computer so that you could take it with you, first as a luggable suitcase, then in your briefcase, and eventually in your pocket.The • Desktop workstation from Metaphor transition from desktop machines to laptops was about designing Computers, designed by Mike Nuttall of the physical interface to be small enough to carry easily without Matrix Product Design and Jim Yurchenco of changing the interactions on the display significantly because of David Kelley Design the smaller size. And the same interface and applications had to Photo work on both. Rick English Alan Kay is well known for his summarizing the Xerox PARC credo as: “The best way to predict the future is to invent it!” His conceptual contributions helped in the formation of the Alto and the Dynabooks in parallel, so we look first at how his ideas about portability emerged, and how his group at PARC developed the first luggable computer, the NoteTaker. The next dramatic shrinking of the machine was the leap from luggable to laptop.The author’s personal account of the story of designing the GRiD Compass, the first laptop computer, is included in the introduction, as it triggered his quest for interaction design.The rest of the story of how the Compass came into being is told in an interview with John Ellenby, the founder of GRiD Systems.
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