A Simple Vision of the Future

A Brief Update Of My 1971 Pendery Paper

In the 1990's there will be millions of personal computers. They will be the size of notebooks of today, have high-resolution flat-screen reflective displays, weigh less than ten pounds, have ten to twenty times the computing and storage capacity of an Alto. Let's call them Dynabooks.

The purchase price will be about that of a color television set of the era, although most of the machines will be given away by manufacturers who will be marketing the content rather than the container of personal computing.

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Though the Dynabook will have considerable local storage and will do most computing locally, it will spend a large percentage of its time hooked to various large, global information utilities which will permit communication with others of ideas, data, working models, as well as the daily chit-chat that organizations need in order to function. The communications link will be by private and public wire and by packet radio, Dynabooks will also by used as servers in the information utilities. They will have enough power to be entirely shaped by software.

The Main Points Of This Vision

• There need only be a few hardware types to handle almost all of the processing activity of a system.
• Personal Computers, Communications Link, and Information Utilities are the three critical components of a Xerox future.

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In other words, the material of a computer system is the computer itself, all of the content and function is fashioned in software.

There are two important guidelines to be drawn from this:

• Material: If the design and development of the hardware computer material is done as carefully and completely as Xerox's development of special light-sensitive alloys, then only one or two computer designs need to be built... Extra investment in development here will be vastly repaid by simplifying the manufacturing process and providing lower costs through increased volume.
• Content: Aside from the wonderful generality of being able to continuously shape new content from the same material, software has three important characteristics:
  • the replication time and cost of a content-function is zero
  • the development time and cost for a content-function is high
  • the change time and cost for a content-function is low

Xerox must take these several points seriously if it is to survive and prosper in its new business are of information media. If it does, the company has an excellent chance for several reasons:

• Xerox has the financial base to cover the large development costs of a small number of very powerful computer-types and a large number of software functions.
• Xerox has the marketing base to sell these functions on a wide enough scale to garner back to itself an incredible profit.
• Xerox has working for it an impressively large percentage of the best software designers in the world.