[SIGCIS-Members] Origin of the Tablet

[Chuck House]

I would certainly confirm this version about Alan.  He used my HP1300A vector graphics CRT for the Flex machine, which was an electrostatic CRT built on a 14” TV bottle salvaged from an electromagnetic TV display.   We in the HP Colorado Springs ‘scope lab were experimenting with the Plato plasma display at the time also since my boss, John Strathman, was a U of I grad still very connected.  Alan did not see our work, but he did see the U of I work.  He did not start the Dynabook until PARC, more like 1972 as indicated.

Sutherland knew of our display in 1966. I had visited his MIT lab after the IBM Share Design conference in May 1965 in New Orleans, and came away much impressed after seeing Sketchpad and Project MAC.  

My partner in the US Forestry (summers while we were in college) was at the U of Utah (Irving McQuarrie).  His uncle Don McQuarrie (MD, head of the local AMA)  teamed with Homer Warner at the U to create Beehive Medical Electronics long before Evans and Sutherland was founded.  Beehive became a key raster graphics terminal for computer interaction in the late 1960’s, building terminals for HP, Cromemco, and Harris among others, and even for the Altair later on.  Beehive was Alan Kay’s first employer, summers while he was a U of Utah undergraduate.  

I built the HP1300A as the display for HP’s new minicomputer, the 2116 in 1966, but marketing and HP Labs insisted that an ASR-33 was ample for user interface.  Packard ordered the HP 1300A canceled in prototype form, hence the later “Medal of Defiance” because we built and sold it anyway.  We introduced in spring 1967, selling the first one to Doug Engelbart at SRI.  and I think the one for U of Utah was in the first forty.  By 1970, Carl Machover later estimated only 1,000 interactive computer terminals existed in the world, a fair number of them that HP box  for $2,000.  The IBM vector graphics box introduced eighteen months or so earlier, was more like $200,000.  They did not sell particularly well.

So Alan was plenty versed in the notion of graphical as well as textual display on CRTs—recall that the Culler-Fried graphics terminals had been ‘widely’ available by the early 1960s (certainly predating the IBM machine that gets the credit).  Success has a thousand creators—Alan has also given credit (his ‘aha’ moment) to the day he saw the HP 35 handheld scientific calculator, since he had loved the HP 9100A and long considered it “the first personal computer"


On Dec 19, 2014, at 8:32 PM, Brian Dear <brian at platohistory.org> wrote:

> Interesting piece! Didn't know about this U of I student project -- cool!
> 
> One minor tidbit in the article got my attention -- dating Alan Kay's "Dynabook" being from 1968. I would suggest it dates more officially from 1972, not 1968. In '68-'69 he was working in Utah on his PhD dissertation about the FLEX machine.  In '68 he'd visited the U of I to attend an ARPA conference of grad students, and while at the U of I he'd seen a demo of the prototype of the upcoming PLATO plasma display panel (PDP), which, he once told me, was his "aha" moment, the realization that personal computing devices of the future could truly be portable as they wouldn't require lugging around a CRT. But judging from his output in '68-'69, especially his dissertation, seems to me the Dynabook concept was still a gleam in his eye and it wouldn't be until he'd arrived at Xerox PARC and settled in that he'd have time to fully flesh it out, culminating in the famous 1972 published article.
> 
> - Brian
> 
> 
> Brian Dear
> PLATO History Project
> La Jolla, California 
> brian at platohistory.org
> www.platohistory.org
> www.friendlyorangeglow.com
> @platohistory
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> 
> 
> 
> 
>> On Dec 18, 2014, at 9:46 AM, Dag Spicer <dspicer at computerhistory.org> wrote:
>> 
>> A nice piece today on the CHM Blog by Assistant Curator Alex Lux.
>> 
>> Enjoy: http://www.computerhistory.org/atchm/yesterdays-tomorrows-the-origins-of-the-tablet/
>> 
>> Best,
>> 
>> Dag
>> --
>> Dag Spicer
>> Senior Curator
>> Computer History Museum
>> Editorial Board, IEEE Annals of the History of Computing
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