Alan Kay has agreed to do an AMA today

Hi Alan,

My understanding was that you were there at the keynote where Steve Jobs launched the iPad. From what we've heard Steve came up to you after the event and asked you what you thought (implicitly acknowledging your work on the Dynabook).

Subsequent interviews suggested you thought that the iOS range of products "were the first computers good enough to criticise".

My question is: what has to happen next for the iPad to start achieving what you wanted to do with the Dynabook?

I won't presume to speak for Alan, but my understanding of what he's said is very different historically. As I recall, he said that the first Macintosh was "the first computer worth criticizing" (something like that). When Jobs introduced the iPhone, he asked Alan whether it was "worth criticizing," and he said no, but if Jobs were to make it a certain size (I forget the dimensions he mentioned, but one of them was 8"), he would "own the world." This suggested the iPad, which did become very popular, though arguably the iPhone became even more so.

I remember one thing Alan said (this was a couple years after the introduction of the iPhone, but I think it was before the iPad), which relates to your question is, "I wish they'd allow people to program the darn thing," which I took to mean, "program on the darn thing!"

Tablet computers existed long before the iPad, though they were bulky and expensive. I used to write software that ran on Telxon tablet units back in the mid-1990s, which used WiFi. A bit later they got enough memory and processing power that we were able to run Microsoft Windows on them, though they cost several thousand dollars each (not a consumer price point). I remember in video of a reunion of former Xerox PARC employees (around the year 2000. It's on the internet), Chuck Thacker held up a Tablet PC running Squeak, and he said, "This is a Dynabook right here." That sort of thing is more of a Dynabook than the iPad, because the software development licensing restrictions for iOS don't even allow people to share code from one unit to the next, because it's considered a security hazard. Apple let up on the restrictions such that people could write code on them, in an environment such as Scratch, but they're not allowed to share code from unit to unit. Instead, they have to jump through hoops, posting code on a web server for others to download.

Part of what the Dynabook was supposed to do was allow people to share code without the thought that it was a security hazard, because it would be designed to be a safe environment for that sort of thing. The iPad has the hardware form factor of a Dynabook (if I may say so), but its system ideas are far from it. It's designed as a consumer product where people are supposed to use it for personal interaction, gaming, consumption of digital content, and little else.