bzs@ENCORE.COM (Barry Shein) (01/17/89)
This month's CD-ROM Review Magazine has an ad and an article for a new product called "Dynabook". Basically it's a 10MHZ '286, removeable flat "double supertwist display" (720x400), an "invisible touch screen" and CD-ROM drive with audio capability (floppy, optional 20MB disk.) The keyboard port is hidden and they seem to discourage getting a keyboard. The article inside describes the display as 720x400 with four shades of gray ``sound waves bounce across the front of the the screen to find touches -- sort of a sonar for fingers. One of the advantages of surface acoustic waves, Stokes says, is that the screen "learns" where dirt, dust and fingerprints are and, after 15 seconds, ignores them.'' There's a picture of the machine (the display looks quite good), one box about the footprint of a PC box tho much shorter (looks like most of the height is a half-high CD-ROM drive) and a coil cord out to a, perhaps, 8"x12"x1" screen with a stand in back (in the ad the person is just holding it with one hand and touching with the other.) The basic idea seems to be that they throw page images of a book (the ad shows a page with an engraving and some text from a book about Dante Rosetti) onto the screen and you use your fingers to turn pages, mark text to be remembered etc. The price listed is $4500 ($5000 with 20MB disk), the company is: Scenario, Inc 235 Holland Street Somerville, MA 02144 (617) 625-1818 -Barry Shein, ||Encore|| P.S. I have no financial relationship with this company etc etc, I just saw the ad and began typing...
jbn@glacier.STANFORD.EDU (John B. Nagle) (01/17/89)
That's awful. The hardware exists for Alan Kay's vision and it comes out as an MS-DOS machine. John Nagle
garye@hpdsla.HP.COM (Gary Ericson) (01/27/89)
> This month's CD-ROM Review Magazine has an ad and an article for a new > product called "Dynabook". I haven't been able to get my hands on this article yet, but I have seen an ad for the Dynabook. It looks to me like it's simply a high-tech CD reader - a "DYNAmic BOOK". > -Barry Shein, ||Encore|| > That's awful. I think what's awful is that, although the name Dynabook makes literal sense with this product (it's a dynamic book), the name Dynabook carries a lot of history and hopes within the computer industry for a revolution in personal computing power. It's too bad that Alan Kay didn't copyright the name and then wait to release it to the company that came closest to his original idea. Now that the name is being used on this "lesser" product, the name kinda loses its significance. 8^( > The hardware exists for Alan Kay's vision ... I think the only thing here that gets close to Kay's idea is the portable screen with touch input, but the thing is tethered to a desk-bound box. The real Dynabook will be completely self-contained in a notebook-sized box with the display on top. It would also (probably) have a higher resolution screen, and a stylus (as well as touch) input on the screen for more precise inputs and for hand writing text. > ... it comes out as an MS-DOS machine. If a real Dynabook were built, I wouldn't mind if the first version came out with MS-DOS. That would open the door for a large number of people to write application code to exploit the new interface. > John Nagle Gary Ericson - Hewlett-Packard, Workstation Technology Division phone: (408)746-5098 mailstop: 101N email: gary@hpdsla9.hp.com