Slashdot Mirror

Alan Kay, 1972 looks like a kindle or an ipad with onscreen keyboard
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dynabook
Actually a popular encyclopedia we had in my house around 30 years ago had a yearly supplement called year book or world book I think. It had a special feature showing Smalltalk running on a Dynabook - IIRC a tablet without a keyboard showing.
You had sprites, like tiny triangles, and you could program them in Smalltalk like a logo turtle but it seemed even more sophisticated.
This totally fired my imagination as a young kid, I would have dreams about it and it got me into computers (though not sure if it was the first contact with them since I took a course in fortran on keypunch machines too around then).
Incidentally this article from Jan. 2010 says:
In Arthur C. Clarke’s 1968 novel 2001: A Space Odyssey, Clarke describes something called a "Newspad" (a foolscap-sized device), which one of the novel’s central characters, Heywood Floyd, “plugs into the ship's information circuit and scans the latest reports from Earth. One by one he would conjure up the world's major electronic papers; he knew the codes of the more important ones by heart, and had no need to consult the list on the back of his pad. Switching to the display unit's short-term memory, he would hold the front page while he quickly searched the headlines and noted the items that interested him.”

Sequels and Prequels of Blade Runner, and Ridley Scott may or may not be involved???

Actually, I'm not sure Ridley Scott would be much of a help ... apparently, he's busy making prequels to Alien, in 3D no less.

I'd like them to not suck, but I fear they might. :(