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From the Desk to the Palm
Interviews with John Ellenby, Jeff Hawkins, Bert Keely, Rob Haitani, and Dennis Boyle
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- Desktop workstation from Metaphor Computers, designed by Mike Nuttall of Matrix Product Design and Jim Yurchenco of David Kelley Design
Photo
Rick English
In the 1990s there will be millions of personal computers.
They will be the size of notebooks today, have high-resolution
flat-screen reflexive displays, weigh less than ten pounds,
have ten to twenty times the computing and storage capacity
of an Alto. Letrsquo;s call them Dynabooks.
Alan Kay, 19711
DESIGNING THE LAPTOP and the palmtop was about shrinking the computer so that you could take it with you, first as a luggable suitcase, then in your briefcase, and eventually in your pocket.The transition from desktop machines to laptops was about designing the physical interface to be small enough to carry easily without changing the interactions on the display significantly because of the smaller size. And the same interface and applications had to work on both.
Alan Kay is well known for his summarizing the Xerox PARC credo as: “The best way to predict the future is to invent it!” His conceptual contributions helped in the formation of the Alto and the Dynabooks in parallel, so we look first at how his ideas about portability emerged, and how his group at PARC developed the first luggable computer, the NoteTaker. The next dramatic shrinking of the machine was the leap from luggable to laptop.The authorrsquo;s personal account of the story of designing the GRiD Compass, the first laptop computer, is included in the introduction, as it triggered his quest for interaction design. The rest of the story of how the Compass came into being is told in an interview with John Ellenby, the founder of GRiD Systems.
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From the Desk to the Palm | 155
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- Handspring Treo
Photo
Courtesy of Handspring
Jeff Hawkins joined GRiD as an entrepreneurial young engineer and, after gaining some experience working for John Ellenby, was given responsibility for developing GRiDpad, the first tablet computer to reach the market. He describes how he went on to create the palmtop, leading the team that created the Palm operating system (OS) and developing the series of PalmPilots that were so successful.The Palm OS was developed in 1995 and was an immediate success. It is dramatically different from the operating systems that evolved for personal computers: there is no mouse or desktop. Rob Haitani was a key member of Jeff rsquo;s team right from the beginning and was in charge of the interaction design for the Palm OS and its applications; he discusses the reasons behind the design of the operating system in his interview and recounts the details of the process.
Jeff Hawkins went on to found Handspring, extending the range of products using the Palm OS. He had worked with Dennis Boyle of IDEO to develop the Palm V, a design that was attractive enough to dramatically increase the popularity of electronic organizers, and continued to work with Dennis for a series of products at Handspring. Dennis tells how the Palm V was designed and how he and his team developed a camera to plug into the Handspring Springboard slot. The chapter concludes with the story of the development of the Handspring Treo, which combined the PDA organizer with an email communicator and a cell phone.
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From the Desk to the Palm | 157
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- Alan Kay
Photo
Courtesy of The National Academies
Alan Kay
ALAN KAY ARGUES that user interface design started when the people who were designing computers noticed that end users had functioning minds. He describes his own epiphany:
For me it was the FLEX machine, an early desktop personal computer of the late sixties designed by Ed Cheadle and myself. Based on much previous work by others, it had a tablet as a pointing device, a high-resolution display for text and animated graphics, and multiple windows, and it directly executed a high-level object-oriented end-user simulation language. And of course it had a “user interface,” but one that repelled end users instead of drawing them closer to the hearth.2
In 1968 he felt that he was “hit on the head” by several amazing innovations. At the University of Illinois there was the first little piece of glass with glowing text characters, giving a glimpse of the future potential for flat screen displays. He then read McLuhanrsquo;s Understanding Media (1964),3 and the concept that “the medium is the message” made him believe that it is in the nature of people to be reshaped by tools, that the invention of the printing press really did make us a scientific society, and hence living in the age of computers will reshape us again:
The computer is a medium! I had always thought of the computer as a tool, perhaps a vehicle4—a much weaker conception. What McLuhan was saying is that if the personal computer is truly a new medium, then the very use of it will actually change the thought patterns of an entire civilization. He had certainly been right about the electronic stained-glass window that is television—a remedievalizing tribal influence at best.5
Shortly after reading McLuhan, Kay visited Seymour Papert at MITrsquo;s Artificial Intelligence Laboratory. Papert had spent five years working with Jean Pi
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