Dynabook--like an iPad

Also in my previous class, I learned about a concept that had been envisioned since the mid 1970s that sounds exactly like an iPad. Basically Alan Kay and Adele Goldberg who woked at Xerox Palo Alto Research Center came up with the concept of the notebook computer--what they called a dynabook. The idea was that it would be able to read back recorded inforrmation. It would be the size and shape of a notebook yet it would contain "enough power to outrace your senses of sight and hearing, enough capacity to store for later retrieval thousands of page-equivalents of reference materials, poems, letters, recipes, records, drawings, animations, musical scores, waveforms, dynamic simulations, and anything else you would like to remember and change" (The New Media Reader, 2003, pg. 394). Basically they envisioned a device that would be both small and portable as well as "both take in and give out information in quantities approaching that of human sensory systems" (pg. 394)
According to my teacher, the concept of the Dynabook is similar to today's iPad due to being portable and containing a great amount of storage in which not only would the device be able to store data, word text,and images,it would also be able to store music, games and videos as well. Unfortunately while the Dynabook as a concept sounds amazing--its decendent, the iPad truthfully doesn't seem so fantastic. (In a previous blog, I admitted that I really didn't understand the iPad and believed that it may actually be a flop)

Here's a link to a blog in which someone praises the iPad as being the living embodiment of the envisioned Dynabook--and the technology of the future.