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*                                                            * 

*                         CYBERSPACE                         * 

*         A biweekly column on net culture appearing         * 

*                in the Toronto Sunday Sun                   * 

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* Copyright 1999 Karl Mamer                                  * 

* Free for online distribution                               * 

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*   <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 who's 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.