The idea of the FLEX Machine and a visit to Seymour Papert in the late 60’s encouraged Alan Kay to create “A Personal Computer For Children Of All Ages.” I don’t know how the name “Dynabook” came about, but it described an electronic book that could dynamically change. As the introduction says, the name was also about “the relationship of people to computers will itself also change.”
Come see Alan speak about the ideas of the Dynabook at the “40th Anniversary of the Dynabook“, on Nov 5th at the Computer History Museum in Mountain View.
I’ll be there!
Panelists:
- Alan Kay
- Charles Thacker
- Mary Lou Jepsen
ARM announced at their developer’s conference a collaboration called the Linux Mobile Platform to enable development of portable computing devices for browsing, multimedia, wire/wireless Ethernet connectivity and better battery life. Since one of the six partners is Mozilla, focus on the Firefox web browser is a given. The integration of GStreamer for the multimedia framework is targeted for multimedia. But, since the platform is Linux and is open, anything is game.
This is great news for me because it provides the world another potentially capable hardware platform to support Squeak mobile computing. It may also provide the computing power for the software being developed at Viewpoints Research in their quest to create a new personal computing model.
If ARM and partners follow through, with the Viewpoints’ new software paradigm the journey to a truly portable Dynabook may be measurably closer.
“At sea once more we had to pass the Sirens, whose sweet singing lures sailors to their doom. I had stopped up the ears of my crew with wax, and I alone listened while lashed to the mast, powerless to steer toward shipwreck.”
Stephen Travis Pope has released a significant upgrade to Siren and it is now available at the Siren site. Along with the upgrade are updates to the documentation and a fantastic video tutorial available in lo-fi (94 MB) and hi-fi (240 MB). If you’re just curious, check out the video – Stephen explains the many capabilities of Siren in a clear and understanding way.
Excerpts from Stephen’s announcement:
“The Siren system is an open-source general-purpose software framework for sound and music composition and production; it is a collection of about 375 classes written in the Smalltalk programming language and intended for use with for the VisualWorks Smalltalk system (though most of it is portable to other dialects of Smalltalk). Siren includes cross-platform support for MIDI and audio I/O; the source code and documentation files are all available from the Siren home.
What’s New?
Many parts of Siren were upgraded, enhanced, or rewritten for the 7.5 release. All of the external interfaces (e.g., for sound I/O, MIDI, FFTW, and other external libraries) have been rewritten to be more portable and robust. The entire EventScheduler has been updated, and there are several new packages, such as the CSL and Loris application packages.
Two new tools – the SirenUtility and the SirenTransport – have been added to assist users with general environment maintenance and with session state, and data persistency has been incorporated into the SirenSession class. Lastly, the documentation, including the web pages, the on-line Siren workbook, and the complete reference manual, have been greatly enhanced in Siren 7.5.”
Siren runs on VisualWorks which is free for personal use. You can find it the Cincom download page. There are external libraries that must be built and available before you install Siren. Mac OSX binaries are available for your convenience. If you are running on Linux or Windows, you’ll need to build these yourself. To build Siren, see Stephen’s recipe here. Easy.
Important technologies and ideas in the past several decades have provided significant pieces for a new radical multimedia authoring environment. Unfortunately, the few explanations on the web miss the relevance and the power these inventions can provide artists. Most are historical (for instance) and naturally do not propound on “what could have been.” If you zoom back in time and take a close look across the 60s, 70s and most recently the late 90s, you’ll see that these visionary ideas lay a foundation for a provocative, yet practical multimedia authoring environment.
Unfortunately, the birth of the IBM PC and the Apple Lisa/Mac ignored most of these cool ideas. Today we tolerate their descendants but only because we know no better. Of course we use the mouse, icons, overlapping windows and bit-mapped displays invented in the 60s and 70s. Eventually Ethernet and desktop publishing was added to our personal computing arsenal (also invented in the 70s.) That’s good. But those technologies surround a central and more powerful idea that has never fully been exploited: a self-described computing environment which can be completely and dynamically defined and extended by the artist. More about this later.
Some forgotten ideas have been previously discussed by others much smarter than I and so I’ll reference their work in this series. For instance, presentations from Dr. Alan Kay on the history of Smalltalk, expound on this subject and are freely available on the net. While the application of these technologies for the authoring of art is the main subject of these posts, I trust you’ll take the links provided about past innovations to discover their impact on the Ultimate Multimedia Environment.
Let’s first step back a bit and start in the early 60s. Ivan Sutherland is said to have introduced drawing on a computer, the first window and perhaps the first implementation of object-oriented [1] graphic instances with his PhD thesis Sketchpad. This is 1962, almost a decade before the term “object-oriented” was coined (for more on object-oriented programming roots, see links below.) Here’s a video of Dr. Sutherland drawing with Sketchpad using MIT’s TX-2 computer. Commentary is by Dr. Alan Kay.
The impressive contributions of Douglas Engelbart and colleagues from SRI’s Augmentation Research Center can not be ignored, of course. Most everyone knows about the mouse, it’s origin and Doug. But, I’m surprised that many have not seen Doug’s and Bill English’s “1968 Demo” and the many powerful inventions that were shown by this group almost 40 years ago: the mouse/mouse pointer, hypertext, video teleconferencing with white board collaboration. (The computer was a meager ~0.5 MIPs, 192k bytes and timeshared, located 30 miles away.) He stressed that personal computers in workplaces should be immediately responsive to the user’s input. A critical requirement for a true user-centered authoring environment.
Both of these technologies embody the requirements and the seed of a vision for a truly personal computing experience.
Next up: Prerequisites of a user-defined authoring environment for artists. What all this rigmarole has to do with the creative individual.
[1] Inspired by Sketchpad, Simula and his study in biology and mathematics, Alan Kay coined the term “object-oriented” during the design of his Flex machine. Here is a 2003 email about his claim. Note that he was influenced by many giants before him, including Dahl and Nygaard of Simula fame.
Qwaq’s announcement for their secure virtual workspace product, called
Qwaq Forums, signifies an important milestone for the open-source Croquet project and Squeak.
Although Squeak is already the foundation for many great applications (Etoys, Etoys on OLPC, Seaside web server, the Sophie multimedia document creator, to name a few), this announcement catapults Croquet quickly into the business realm.
What is a Qwaq Forum? Unfortunately, I can’t give you first hand report on Qwaq Forums. Hopefully, someone will place a video demo online for us to view. I can tell you about Croquet – an open source 3D development environment to create distributed multi-user virtual 3D applications. It’s quite a freeing feeling walking, talking and collaborating with others and directly with applications floating in air. Anyone can download Croquet and try it out. Please do, you’ll have fun.
Back to Qwaq Forums. The site says that Qwaq Forums are “virtual spaces for real work.” I imagine a room where the Forum owner can maintain the security level of the room and of each person entering and keeping riffraff out – from individual rights all the way to anonymous users. Picture a secure office that can be locked up at night with a security card reader on the door – but you don’t have to physically travel to use the room. Being a user of Croquet, I can easily see how the room would work. You can also write code and change your environment in Croquet – it’s a totally open platform.
An important feature that Qwaq cites is persistence: “all users can see all previous changes and additions” in the forums. Teams can maintain their work and the progress made. From the product datasheet:
“Setting up a Qwaq Forum is simple: start by simply dragging and dropping content into a workspace in Qwaq Forums. All other users present will see the content immediately and will be able to start working with it right away.”
I don’t know what could be easier.
I won’t know more about the Forums until I get my hands on it. If a video becomes available, I’ll post it here. In the meantime, check out Croquet and Squeak. There are plenty of content developers and programmers out there – your application in this 3D space could literally change the world. The field, er.. virtual space… is wide open!
alan kay, computer history museum, dynabook, personal computer, smalltalk, squeak 
