Did Roger Fidler invent the #iPad in 1994?

Roger Fidler with the iPad and his tablet 

An interesting video has surfaced on YouTube that shows Roger Fidler, University of Missouri program director for digital publishing, talking about a device for digital newspapers that looks very similar to the iPad. Moreover, you'll see in the video that many of the features of Fidler's tablet are very similar to the iPad and features of the Safari browser and magazine apps.
   Samsung, who is in patent infringement litigation with Apple, is claiming that since Filbert's tablet was in the public domain in 1994 Apple can't have patented the idea. However, before we all rush off and call Steve Jobs a conman and a plagiarist, we should appreciate that Fidler's tablet was only an idea, he never built them.

Alan Kay with the Dynabook

   If we want to find the real inventor of the iPad then Alan Kay of Xerox PARC can probably lay claim to having first invented the idea with his Dynabook in 1972, a small portable tablet with an intuitive GUI. However, like Fidler's tablet, the Dynabook remained just an idea until Apple built it and called it the iPad.
   
(skip in about 4 mins to see the tablet)

Did Steve Jobs Steal The iPad? Genius Inventor Alan Kay Reveals All

Another "iPad is the Dynabook" article but it does have some interesting insights from Alan Kay towards it's end.

Time to do some work

It's Tuesday and the University is closed today (mid-semester break) so I can get some work done on the book.

With the iPad being so much in the news this weekend and some techies commenting that it's the  Dyanbook made real I'm going to get some material together on Alan Kay, it's inventor.

 Alan Kay is one of the legendary ex-employees of Xerox PARC credited with helping invent the GUI, object-oriented programming and the tablet computer or eBook (i.e., the Dynabook).

The best book I've come across on the subject of Xerox PARC is:
Dealers of Lightning: Xerox PARC and the Dawn of the Computer Age by Michael A. Hiltzik

Running over 400 pages it's very comprehensive, but probably only for the devoted. My task is to distil this book down into few pages that summarise the highlights of Xerox's remarkable influence on modern computing. Alan Kay's contribution I guess will have to occupy no more than a few paragraphs! This isn't going to be easy.

His home page is at http://www.smalltalk.org/alankay.html though it doesn't look like it's maintained by him. I do like this quote though:

"Don't worry about what anybody else is going to do… The best way to predict the future is to invent it. Really smart people with reasonable funding can do just about anything that doesn't violate too many of Newton's Laws!"

This would make a good quote for the start of the chapter.

There's also a page at Viewpoints Research Institute where Alan was a founder http://vpri.org/html/people/founders.htm

Here I discover that in addition to being a brilliant computer scientist it seems that Alan was also a professional jazz guitarist. Gosh don't you love these multi-talented people? My wife says that a lot of very bright people are also talented musicians, seems like she's right in this case.