“Imagine having your own self-contained knowledge manipulator in a portable package the size and shape of an ordinary notebook. Suppose it had enough power to outrace your senses of sight and hearing, enough capacity to store for later retrieval thousands of page-equivalents of reference materials, poems, letters, recipes, records, drawings, animations, musical scores, waveforms, dynamic simulations, and anything else you would like to remember and change.” (Kay, Goldberg 394)
This quote from <a href=”http://www.newmediareader.com/book_samples/nmr-26-kay.pdf”>Alan Kay and Adele Goldberg’s “Personal Dynamic Media”</a> was amazingly written in 1977. Their mockup of the Dynabook was an astoundingly accurate prediction of technology. The iPad was released 33 years after this essay was published and the mockup of the Dynabook was made and fulfills all of the features of the theoretical Dynabook plus more. I am astonished at how many of the elements the iPad has that they were able to predict would be available in the future when technology at the time was so far from this, with computers that probably couldn’t even store an mp3 never mind complete all the tasks proposed for the Dynabook in a notebook sized device.