The Dynabook at 10
by Bob Johnstone

Ten years ago, while waiting for a Toyoko line train at Yokohama station I noticed a huge advertisement, by Toshiba, for a new computer called Dynabook. "What a cheek!" I remember thinking, "I bet Alan Kay* would be really annoyed if he knew that Toshiba had pinched his name." How wrong can you be? On meeting Alan Kay late last year I discovered that, so far from having been annoyed by Toshiba's presumption, he was actually delighted. Kay pointed me in the direction of Tetsuya Mizoguchi, the developer at Toshiba who was inspired by his vision to build a Japanese version of the Dynabook. I finally caught up with Mizoguchi when I visited Tokyo in June, just a few days before the Toshiba notebook celebrated its tenth anniversary.

The idea for the Dynabook came to Alan Kay on the plane home from a trip. It was fall 1968, and he had been to visit Seymour Papert, a math professor at the Artificial Intelligence Laboratory of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Papert was teaching seventh-grade kids at the Muzzy Junior High School in Lexington, MA, to program a computer. They were using clunky time-sharing terminals hooked up, via phone line, to a DEC machine located back at MIT. Input was via keyboard; output, from a Teletype printer. There was no display.

The modern day book
An image of what a personal computer should look like flashed into Kay's mind. He remembered reading about Aldus Manutius, a fifteenth century Venetian printer, who was the first to produce books in modern format. Having realized that books could be portable, Aldus went out and measured saddlebags to determine the ideal size. Kay determined to do the same for the computer, to transform it into what he called a "personal dynamic medium." His computer would be no larger than a notebook so that kids could take it with them wherever they went.

"A clear romantic vision has a marvelous ability to focus thought and will, Kay recalled. "Now it was easy to know what to do next. I built a cardboard model of [the Dynabook] to see what it would look like, and poured in lead pellets to see how light it would have to be (less than two pounds)." His model looked much like a modern notebook computer, except that it was flat like a drawing board.

But Kay's vision was more than a decade ahead of the state of the art. At Xerox PARC, the closest they could come was the Alto, a workstation that Kay dubbed "the Interim Dynabook." The Alto became the inspiration for the Apple Macintosh.

GRiD had it first
Xerox famously failed to exploit the breakthroughs made at its lab. The company didn't even bother to trademark the Dynabook name. The first serious portable computer was made by GRiD, a start-up founded in 1979 by two former PARC researchers, Glenn Edens and John Ellenby. Inspired by Kay's vision, the GRiD machine incorporated a host of innovations, many of them now taken for granted - such as a switching power supply, built-in modem, and magnesium case. Above all, the familiar clamshell design, which allowed the computer to fold up to protect the screen for travel. Makers pay royalties on GRiD's clamshell patent to this day.

Flat panel displays
PARC was dedicated to the notion that the display was the whole point of the computer. But in early 1980, there were no flat panel screens available in the US - the technology had migrated to Japan. So Edens and Ellenby took their model off to Japan for a tour of potential suppliers. They set up a race between component vendors, each of which backed a different display technology. Sharp's bet was electroluminescence, Sony's plasma (the technology that Kay had seen in embryo form at the University of Illinois), Toshiba's liquid crystal displays. Though Sharp made the early running, in early 1984, GRiD plumped for Toshiba's LCDs.

Supplying the American firm enabled Toshiba to build up its flat panel production capacity. This would prove a crucial factor the following year when the Japanese firm entered the laptop market in its own right. By 1989 - the year of the Dynabook's introduction - Toshiba was the dominant player in laptops, with a 40 percent share of the European and Japanese markets and a 25 percent share of the US market. But achieving that kind of dominance takes more than superior componentry - you need a champion. In Toshiba's case, the champion was Tetsuya Mizoguchi.

Mizoguchi is very far from being your stereotypical salaryman. He is tall and big-boned, with a wrestler's physique, a shock of gray-white hair, and a commanding voice. As you might expect for a man whose namecard reads "corporate senior vice president, president and CEO digital media & services company," Mizoguchi has about him an aura of power. His manner is frank, and he takes evident pleasure in recounting his part in the Dynabook story.

In 1977, while nominally in charge of mainframe computer development at Toshiba, Mizoguchi came up with what he claims was Japan's first PC. This was the T400, a "phantom machine" that was never marketed. That same year, he read a paper by Alan Kay, "Personal Dynamic Media," in the March edition of IEEE Computer. It described the Dynabook as a computer that you could look at like a newspaper and listen to like a stereo. "I read that paper and I really felt Ah-ha!" Mizoguchi recalled, "this is a computer that everyone - men and women, young and old - will be able to communicate with. And I thought, in the future, I really want to develop a Dynabook like the one he described."

Eleven years later, he got his chance. At that stage laptops were still tethered to the AC power socket. Mizoguchi said "Let's develop a battery-driven machine." Work started in 1988. On June 26, 1989, Toshiba announced its first Dynabook.

The next day, Mizoguchi wrote a letter to Alan Kay, saying, "We've taken the first step towards making the machine you wrote about in that 1977 paper." He sent it off, together with a translation of the catalog, to MIT's Media Lab, where Kay was a visiting scholar. Three weeks passed without an answer. Then Mizoguchi remembered reading somewhere that Kay actually lived in Los Angeles. He called Toshiba's Irvine, CA, facility and had them dig up Kay's address. Mizoguchi posted the same letter there. He waited another three weeks. Still no answer. By this time it was August, and Mizoguchi was getting desperate to contact Kay somehow.

Bright ideas
Then he had another bright idea - every year, around mid-August, Apple holds its Mac World get-together in Boston. Since Kay was an Apple Fellow, perhaps he would be attending and it might be possible to ambush him there? Mizoguchi dispatched a pair of acolytes to Boston with a machine to give to Kay, along with his letter.

Meanwhile, a freelance journalist called Takada had arrived in Boston intending to use his brand-new Dynabook to do interviews at Mac World. On August 11 Takada visited the Media Lab, where he bumped into Alan Kay. The latter was very surprised to see a machine called Dynabook made by Toshiba. Kay was keen to get his hands on one, but Takada refused to part with his. So that night, he called Media Lab boss Nicholas Negroponte for help.

On August 12 Negroponte forwarded Kay's request by e-mail to a Toshiba researcher who had just returned to Japan after a year at the Media Lab. That same morning, Mizoguchi's acolytes arrived in Boston where they met Kay and presented him with his Dynabook. He was astonished: "I only called last night and it's come from Japan already? That's physically impossible!"

Mizoguchi meets Kay
Mizoguchi had yet to meet Kay. His chance came in December that year, when the American flew in to give a presentation at an international conference on multimedia. Next morning, at seven o'clock, Mizoguchi arrived at the Okura to take Kay out to Toshiba's Ome Works on the outskirts of Tokyo, where the company makes laptops and Dynabooks. In the car, Kay talked about his current research interest - the man-machine interface, especially things like handwritten input and voice recognition. Before embarking on their tour of the production line, Mizoguchi called the head of development at the works and instructed him to prepare a special presentation. When Kay arrived at the development department, lined up for his inspection were demonstrations of ... handwritten input and voice recognition, the very things he had been talking about on the way there!

After the tour, Mizoguchi summoned the young researchers at the works to a meeting room. There, Kay gave them a twenty-minute talk on his thoughts about the future of computers. For the youngsters, Mizoguchi recalled, "it was like God had come to see them, and they were very excited, determined to try even harder - which was exactly what I had intended!" he added, laughing loudly.

The visit concluded with Kay signing eight Dynabooks. On one, he wrote, "When can I put this in my pocket?"; on another, "Soon we'll be able to wear them"; and on the last, simply, "I'm very happy that you made this - Alan Kay."

Kay's original vision of the Dynabook - as he made clear in his sketches - was as a children's machine. But portable computers remained essentially the preserve of high-powered business execs until 1990. In that year, Methodist Ladies College in Melbourne, Australia, made laptop computers compulsory for all 82 girls in its grade five classes. (Admittedly, these were not Dynabooks - Toshiba only uses the Dynabook name for products sold on the domestic Japanese market. The actual model was a T1000SE, same as the one Mizoguchi presented to Kay on the occasion of his visit to Ome.)

In a highly competitive market, several other independent schools soon followed MLC's lead. By the time Mizoguchi arrived in Melbourne in Spring 1995 to check out what was happening, there were several thousand laptops in Australian classrooms, the majority of them made by Toshiba.

Mizoguchi's first surprise on visiting Methodist Ladies College was to discover that this was not, as he had thought, a junior college, but a regular K-12 girls school. Mizoguchi sat in on classes - math, English, science, art, music - and watched the kids using their laptops for all sorts of work. More impressive still was the sight, during recess, of girls sitting on the floor playing with their computers in preference to physical games.

5,000,000th laptop
Mizoguchi followed up his visit by inviting a group of Australian principals to a celebration held in Tokyo later that year to commemorate sales of 5,000,000 laptop computers. The same group later visited Toshiba's Irvine, CA, plant, where designers asked them what changes they'd like to make laptops more education-friendly.

In February 1997, a team of engineers from Ome came down to Australia to investigate a curiously high failure rate among hard disk drives used in schools. They discovered that kids are much more intensive users of computers than adults. Kids move from classroom to classroom - the bell for the end of the lesson goes, they slam the lid shut, pick up the laptops, and fling them into their bags. All this time, the hard disk is still spinning. More robust drives were subsequently fitted.

Along with increasing the robustness, reducing the heft of the machines has been another goal. The latest generation of Dynabooks - the 3000 Series - weigh just over two pounds, close to Kay's original estimate. But the big obstacle remains price.

If every kid is to have a laptop computer, an ideal that both Al Gore and George W. Bush have endorsed, if computers are to be used like pencils (and as Seymour Papert says, what good is a fraction of a pencil?), then the cost must come down, from more than US$2,000 today to less than $500.

That, as Mizoguchi concedes, is a big ask. Especially at a time when a decent-sized TFT-LCD screen alone can cost makers as much as $600. (And when Toshiba relies on profits from sales of notebook computers to cancel out losses by other parts of the company.) But if the history of electronics is any guide, it will happen - and probably sooner than you think.

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