[OLPC-SF] Fwd: [Olpc-open] The 40th Anniversary of the Dynabook event at Computer History Museum

[Sameer Verma]

FYI.


---------- Forwarded message ----------
From: Yoshiki Ohshima <yoshiki at vpri.org>
Date: 2008/9/24
Subject: [Olpc-open] The 40th Anniversary of the Dynabook event at
Computer History Museum
To: olpc-open <olpc-open at lists.laptop.org>


 There will be an interesting event.  It is even sponsored by OLPC!

http://www.computerhistory.org/events/index.php?id=1221864610

-- Yoshiki

----------------------

CHM Presents
The 40th Anniversary of the Dynabook


SPONSOR
Sponsored by One Laptop Per Child

Alan Kay, Charles Thacker, and moderated by Steve Hamm, BusinessWeek


DATE & TIME
Wednesday, November 05, 2008

6:00 p.m. Member's Reception - CHM Members only
7:00 p.m. Program
Wine for the Member's Reception provided by the Mountain Winery

LOCATION
1401 N. Shoreline Boulevard
Mountain View, CA 94043

Call 650-810-1005 for information.

ABSTRACT OF TALK
The roots of "personal computers" -- that is, machines that are not
shared between users -- date back to at least the late 1950s. Within a
decade, several more of these "one machine, one user" computers were
developed; and the idea of a user having direct control over the
computer was established, at least within academia.

In 1968, young computer scientist Alan Kay gave a presentation on the
FLEX Machine at a meeting of computer science graduate students and
saw the first working versions of a new flat panel plasma display
technology. This led to discussions about how nice it would be to
(someday) place the FLEX computer itself on the back of such a display
to make a notebook-sized computer.

A visit a few months later to MIT computer scientist and educator
Seymour Papert and to a school with children doing advanced math with
Papert's LOGO programming language, produced an epiphany in Kay. He
decided to make "A Personal Computer For Children Of All Ages." This
was to be in the form of a compact notebook using both tablet and
keyboard, a flat-screen display, GUI, and the wireless networking that
defense funding agency ARPA was starting to experiment with.

This idea eventually acquired the name "Dynabook" as an homage to what
the printed book has meant to civilization and learning. It is also a
gesture to a future in which not just the content of "books" will be
dynamic, but the relationship of people to computers will itself also
change.

The founding of Xerox PARC a few years after the Dynabook concept
provided support and a context for developing many of these ideas. In
fact, the PARC "Alto" workstation was originally called "the interim
Dynabook". Many of the results from this research influenced
commercial computing, including the bit-mapped screen, high-quality
text and graphics, overlapping windows and an icon-based GUI, desktop
publishing, object-oriented programming, and many others.

Join Steve Hamm of BusinessWeek as he moderates a panel discussion to
celebrate this idea that provided metaphor, motivation and inventions
for the personal computers of today.

This event is generously sponsored by One Laptop Per Child.

Panelists:
- Alan Kay
- Charles Thacker
- TBD
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-- 
Dr. Sameer Verma, Ph.D.
Associate Professor of Information Systems
San Francisco State University
San Francisco CA 94132 USA
http://verma.sfsu.edu/
http://opensource.sfsu.edu/