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*                                                            * 
*                         CYBERSPACE                         * 
*         A biweekly column on net culture appearing         * 
*                in the Toronto Sunday Sun                   * 
*                                                            * 
* Copyright 1999 Karl Mamer                                  * 
* Free for online distribution                               * 
* All Rights Reserved                                        * 
* Direct comments and questions to:                          * 
*   <kamamer@yahoo.com>                                      * 
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        iThoughts

Last week Apple rolled out the iBook, the long awaited follow 
on to the computer company's oddly successful iMac offering. 
Newspapers on July 22 ran a picture of a grinning Steve Jobs, 
Apple's once and future saviour, holding his progeny which 
looked like a toilet seat to pretty much everybody I showed the 
picture to.

Steve Jobs is such a super salesman I suppose he can convince 
the world that a laptop shaped like a bathroom fixture is 
innovative. In the early days of Apple, employees claimed Jobs 
projected a "reality distortion field". Anything Jobs said made 
instant, perfect sense. "Drink poison Kool-Aid? Yeah. Yeah. No 
problem!"

Jobs with all his Eastern philosophy spouting and fashionable 
dress (by Silicon valley standards at least) is in some way 
responsible for both the survival of Apple and its limited 
penetration into the hallowed halls of true computer geekdom.

Apple's computers have always had a funky appeal to the crowd 
that's hip enough to know you don't wear socks with 
Birkenstocks but smart enough to know you need to use computers 
to make an income. A niche market clearly. Unfortunately, you 
have to convince techies who wear navy dress socks with 
Birkenstocks that the machine is worthy enough to write 
software for. Apple has always had less success with that 
crowd.

Techies tend to recoil from hipsters. When your back is turned 
they'll compare your computer to a toilet seat. Sweet revenge 
for all the indignities suffered in high school, I suppose.

        iBook: The first chapter

Before the iBook, Apple's first really successful laptop 
computer was the Powerbook. The name "Powerbook" is an obscure 
nod to the work of Alan Kay.

Kay is yet another one of those computer greats whose place in 
computer history has been over shadowed by the likes of Bill 
Gates and Steve Jobs.

For all intents and purposes Kay invented the laptop and the 
future. Kay worked at Xerox's fabled Palo Alto Research Center 
(PARC) in the '70s, when computers were still the size of a 
couple refrigerators. 

At PARC, smart people were paid to develop revolutionary ideas. 
Xerox made a habit of ignoring these ideas (that's another 
column). Kay conceived of a notebook-sized computer called the 
Dynabook (dyna...power...Powerbook). Kay's idea was to give 
every school child in America a Dynabook.

While the notion sounds foolish, giving cool new hardware to a 
small child instead of the commonly accepted practice of giving 
it to the loud, idiot vice president, Kay's attempt to develop 
a computer for children gave rise to not only the laptop 
computer but nearly everything we use today in the world of 
computers.

The technology to actually build a notebook-sized computer did 
not exist in the '70s so Kay was forced to investigate the 
human-factor side of what was then considered a radical notion: 
a personal computer. Kay determined you should program the 
computer. The computer should not program you.

One of the more interesting things Kay did was build a mock up 
of his Dynabook. He filled it with lead shot. He would carry 
the mock up around and after a time, he would add more lead 
shot. Kay wanted to discover how heavy a computer could get 
before you didn't want to lug it around anymore. He concluded 2 
lbs was the maximum.

In Kay's attempt to develop a computer that wouldn't program 
children, he dispensed with the notion of an operating system 
requiring arcane commands. He invented the graphical user 
interface. Kay eventually took his ideas to Apple and helped 
them create the Macintosh.

Naturally, children with their little clumsy hands would find 
QWERTY keyboards both difficult to use and bewildering. A good 
way of giving kids immediate, robust hands-on experience was 
with a little device called a mouse.

You can read a good biography of Kay at 
ei.cs.vt.edu/~history/GASCH.KAY.HTML.