Dynabook - Original Concept

Original Concept

This concept was created two years before the founding of Xerox PARC. Kay wanted to make “A Personal Computer For Children Of All Ages.” The ideas led to the development of the Xerox Alto prototype, which was originally called “the interim Dynabook”. It embodied all the elements of a graphical user interface, or GUI, as early as 1972. The software component of this research was Smalltalk, which went on to have a life of its own independent of the Dynabook concept.

Kay wanted the Dynabook concept to embody the learning theories of Jerome Bruner and some of what Seymour Papert— who had studied with developmental psychologist Jean Piaget and who was one of the inventors of the Logo programming language — was proposing.

The hardware on which the programming environment ran was relatively irrelevant.

At the same time, Kay tried in his 1972 article to identify existing hardware components that could be used in a Dynabook, including screens, processors and storage memory. For example:

"A standalone "smart terminal“ that uses one of these chips for a processor (and includes memory, a keyboard, a display and two cassettes) is now on the market for about $6000"