Great article, based on one of the true visionaries in the computing world IMO, Alan Kay.
The Dynabook, like other technologies that were conceived in the early days (like the Class-D digital audio amplifier and mobile video-phone devices) were simply concepts that went way beyond the state-of-art at their time of invention but whose time is now due (or past due).
To be perfectly honest, I don't think Steve Jobs *stole* the IPad from anybody. I do however, think that he had more than a minor role to play in setting the 'closed-box' design philosophy of nearly all the apple's products going back to the Apple II system, where he initially argued with Woz over the number of internal expansion slots the machine should have. For example, the apple II had eight (thanks Woz
), while the Apple III has only four and the very first Macintosh 128K systems didn't even have one(!) etc.
In retrospect, Xerox upper-management probably weren't aware that they had a real goldmine on their hands at the time when Steve Jobs came over to do a deal with Xerox over acquiring access to Xerox IP like their Smalltalk language and the now widely-used graphical user interface (among other items of interest..).
Regards,
Valentin
