Apple Knowledge Navigator, Vision of the Future
The Knowledge Navigator is discussed in Jim Carlton's book "Apple: The Inside Story of Intrigue, Egomania and Business Blunders" (1997).
"The idea in itself wasn't new (in 1987). The concept of a portable computer that could recognize a user's handwriting and communicate with other computers wirelessly had been articulated many years before, in 1968, by a computer scientist named Alan Kay, who had envisioned a notebook-sized computer he called the 'Dynabook.' Kay was another of the Xerox PARC researchers who had done pioneering work on graphically oriented computers, and he, too, had joined Apple as an Apple Fellow. Alan Kay exerted a strong influence over John Sculley, who borrowed many of his ideas for the Knowledge Navigator from Kay's futuristic research."
"...Sculley was dead on in some of his predictions for the evolution of technology. In (his 1987 book) Odyssey, he described an omnipresent device of the future that he called 'Knowledge Navigator,' which would let a person steer through the reams of data all over the world."
"A decade later, the Internet's World Wide Web would explode, providing the same ability to scan vast databases as the Navigator promised while communicating with other people through the computer at the same time. It would transform the personal computer from a productivity tool into one focussed around the echange and transfer of information, exactly as Sculley had envisioned..."
Sculley wanted Newton to implement the vision.
"Scully was limited in how much he could say about Newton, because details of the technology had not been announced yet. He decided to talk about the general concept of a handheld computer... (and) coin(ed) the term 'personal digital assistant' or PDA...Sculley could also have called it 'Knowledge Navigator,' because the speech borrowed heavily from the Navigator's theme of seamless access to electronic information anytime and anywhere."
We examined a Toshiba Portégé 3500 tablet PC at our local Micro Center over the weekend. It looks like a regular PC notebook the size of a 12.1" iBook but thinner. The 3500 is the type of tablet PC where the screen twists around and folds back on the keyboard with the screen up to become a tablet. The 3500 has a 12.1" screen like the iBook. A tap of the pen causes the image to flip from landscape to portrait mode. We used Windows Journal software to write in "digital ink". It worked very well. The latency was minimal and our handwriting looked just like it does using pen and paper. The key, though, is how well the digitizer works but we were unable to find the digitizing software and the busy sales staff that we were able to talk to didn't know either.
We have also used Jaguar's Ink with a Wacom Graphire2 tablet. It works very well as digital ink too and the digitizer is not bad with our lousy handwriting. However, we find it difficult to write reasonably legibly for long on a Wacom tablet. Being able to write on the screen is definitely much better.
Who would use a tablet PC? We would. Currently, one of our staff uses a 12.1" iBook to attend meetings in his "day job", take notes and mail the notes wirelessly to other staff members as the meetings conclude. Fortunately, the iBook's keyboard is relatively silent so he is not a persona non-grata. He finds this to be a great improvement over taking notes on paper and then typing them up later or reviewing notes typed up by a secretary well after the meetings. But our staff member is a poor typist, slow and inaccurate, despite some 30 years of pounding a computer's keyboard. A tablet PC would make his life much easier since he can write and "format" faster than by typing. The key, as we mentioned previously, is that the digitizer must be accurate with his handwriting.
We find ourselves in the unusual position of agreeing with Darth Bill, i.e. tablet PCs will be big. There are many people who type poorly and slowly and most PC notebook and PowerBook keyboards make a lot of noise when typing quickly. We would like to see Apple produce a "Tablet" iBook. The 10.4" models are too small--that's the screen size of a PowerBook 2400c. The 12.1" models, like the Toshiba, are minimal in our view since there is a tendency to write larger than we would with a pencil or pen on paper. We think a 14.1" Tablet iBook with a removable writing screen would be ideal.
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