TWO ALANS

Dick Pountain/PC Pro/(Idealog 223 - 06/02/2013)

Atari just filed for bankruptcy, which lead me toward a string of rather odd associations. I never was an Atari owner but the firm's demise jogged me into remembering that Alan Kay - that least-heralded inspirer of the personal computer revolution - worked for the firm immediately after leaving his epoch-making stint at Xerox PARC. While at PARC Kay's team pioneered just about everything we now take for granted including object-oriented programs, windowed graphical user interfaces and local area networks, although Xerox notoriously failed to capitalise on this work (as did Atari). It wasn't until Steven Jobs' equally notorious PARC visit that Apple picked up the baton, prompting Kay to move there straight from Atari and remain as a Research Fellow for the next 13 years.

My other Alan-named hero, "father of computing" Alan Turing may soon have a Hollywood film made of his life (as Steve Jobs has). Indeed, after being ignored in embarrassed silence for over 50 years, Turing now has three films: two for British TV, "Breaking the Code" with Derek Jacobi playing him and the rather better "Codebreaker" with Ed Stoppard, while the forthcoming Hollywood biopic "The Imitation Game" may star either Leonardo di Caprio or Benedict Cumberbatch. Alan Kay on the other hand is still alive, nowadays running his own non-profit institute that studies new ideas in educational computing, and what he'll eventually be remembered for (perhaps even with a biopic) is his dream of the Dynabook.

Conceived around 1968, this was to be a revolutionary keyboardless, wireless tablet computer permanently connected to an online library containing all the world's accumulated knowledge, and he wanted every child in the world to have access to one. Kay of course could never actually build a Dynabook because at the time PARC was developing graphical UIs there weren't even any microprocessors, let alone an internet. (His Xerox Star "personal" workstation was a fridge-sized minicomputer built with discrete logic chips). But the fact is that everything required hardwarewise to implement his idea now exists.

In fact my little Nexus 7 already comes pretty close to Kay's ideal, delivering information through Google search and Wikipedia, music and movies via Spotify, YouTube and other places. What it lacks is universality, and that's no longer a technical but a commercial problem, over ownership of both conduit and content and how much we're prepared to pay for them. A Dynabook was supposed to operate wirelessly from anywhere at all, which rules out my Nexus because it's Wi-Fi only - but even were I to buy a 3G tablet and SIM the cost of the data-plan might inhibit me from using it as freely as I do at home. Running a tablet off my home broadband is one thing, but I can't justify an extra account just for outside use. It's the same story with content: I already pay £10 per month to Spotify, justified because music is my main amusement, but similar subscriptions to Netflix or LoveFilm don't tempt me because they don't deal in films I want. If YouTube started charging (as it recently threatened) £5 a month for access I'd probably give that up too. For Kay's dream to finally come true we desperately need to rationalise both  conduit and content licensing to make ubiquitous data access affordable.

Even here, all the necessary hardware and software tricks are already well known. Mobile phone companies have invested mega-billions to cover much of the globe with masts, supporting networks which, unlike the internet, already have an ability to charge for traffic built right in. A global system that mimiced those hierarchical storage systems already employed in enterprise-level computing could be assembled, using the internet as the trunk of a global tree, switching down onto mobile networks for its branches and finally onto village/street level Wi-Fi for its twigs. The problems aren't technically insuperable but colossal efforts of business diplomacy would be required to negotiate equitable distribution of revenues to the owners of these various "wires". In fact the problem facing the ITU would resemble the problem the UN faces in trying to broker world peace, but we're talking dreams here and my point is that the obstacle is no longer hardware.

The same would be true for collecting royalties on content, though Spotify, Netflix and the rest show that this can be done (with difficulty). In fact there's a strong case for heavily subsidising the conduits and charging mostly for the content, along the same historical lines followed by roads and railways. I believe that both of my Alan heroes would agree that a species which can't provide affordable information to educate its offspring, while loudly fantasising about colonising Mars and mining diamonds from asteroids, has pretty weird priorities.