Inventing the Desktop Part 1

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Inventing the Desktop (Part 1)

• James Landay Jason Hong
• Spring 2001
• Feb 08, 2001

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Outline

• Ivan Sutherland Sketchpad
• Alan Kay Dynabook
• Project 1
• For Next Week

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Ivan Sutherland

• PhD MIT
• Helped head DARPA Info Processing
• Now a VP and Sun Fellow

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Sketchpad Video

• PhD Thesis MIT, 1963 (Before Engelbart)

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Sketchpad

• Pen-based interface
• How did he close lines?
• Zooming interface (1/3 mile square)
• Constraints
• Prototype-instance
• Key to Object-Oriented Programming
• Think of it as templates

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Alan Kay

• Xerox PARC
• Atari
• Now a Disney Fellow
• Smalltalk
• Dynabook
• "The best way to predict the
  future is to invent it"

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Alan Kay

• "By the time I got to school, I had already read
  a couple hundred books. I knew in the first grade
  that they were lying to me because I had already
  been exposed to other points of view.
• School is basically about one point of view --
  the one the teacher has or the textbooks have.
  They don't like the idea of having different
  points of view, so it was a battle. Of course I
  would pipe up with my five-year-old voice."

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Seymour Papert

• Get children to program as a technique for
  learning
• Learn by doing
• Logo
• Professor MIT Media Lab

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Video
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Discussion

• Differences between Kay's vision and Engelbart's?

• For children instead of just experts
• Computer as a creative medium
• Art, Music, Text
• Literacy - not just use computers, create with
  them too!
• Personal Computing

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Where are they now?

• Seymour Papert
• Lego Mindstorms
• Alan Kay
• Disney Fellow
• Squeak

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Assignment 1 Influential Figure

• Work in groups of 2
• Paper and presentation (due Feb 22)
• Single HTML page (about 2-3 pages printed)
• Have links to interesting stuff
• 6-7 minute presentations

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Summary

• Double check you're in class
• Mail sent out about Yahoo club
• Next lecture on early PCs
• Reading will be posted soon
• Write up 1 paragraph review post to Yahoo
  egroups
• Turn off egroups mail Delivery Options
• More videos of the birth of the PC