A Vision from the Year 1994
The story of my idea for a Tablet PC sixteen years before it existed.
By Wolkem
English Version of my essay written original in German and translated with Deepl Translate by Deepl SE and own corrections. Original essay in German, see previous post.
The story begins in April 1994. It was a Saturday morning. A few weeks ago, I had bought an MS-DOS Windows 3.1 computer with the new Pentium processor from Intel. Now the wickedly expensive device stood on my desk. A tube monitor with a curved screen and under the desk a tall, narrow, grey tin box with strange contents of plastic cards and soldering metal and other smaller tin boxes, all this mounted on and against a large plastic board. The main board that connects everything in this box, as I learned in an instructive EDP course at the Chamber of Industry and Commerce, and on which the things mounted there looked to me in the draw view like a futuristic city with its streets. And took away half of the space at my desk in its entire EDP system size.
That Saturday, I sat in my armchair in the opposite corner of the room, facing my desk and its electronic innovations, which were still very foreign to me, on top of and underneath it. So, a personal computer servant for the well-kept home? Well, not really by a long shot. It was more for the basement, and the servant was clearly me as the still inexperienced user. The sun was shining, spring was in bloom, I was out of coffee and decided to go to the kiosk and get the weekend edition of a daily newspaper before my next coffee. I came back with the pack and read the feuilleton. The feuilleton was interesting and as I read, some comprehension questions arose, the answers to which I hoped to find in the encyclopaedia. It occurred to me how nice it would be to do this with my new computer without having to get up from my armchair to get to the desk, wait there for the operating system to start, insert the Compact Disc (or was it even still a 3.5-inch diskette?) with the encyclopaedia stored on it, start the query, and then, after a while back in my armchair, have lost or forgotten the pleasure of reading the article further and the associated pleasure of education, whether all this technical doing. Foremost of all, of course, there was the fun of using the still relatively new technology, now also for private people. Then came the practical advantage of being able to process what I had read with the computer, meaning to make notes in digital form. This makes them much clearer and more legible, with beautiful typography and even with colour, then scribbled down by hand in my notebook in a hurry. It was also practical because it was relatively easy to find again – stored as it was – in the digital drawer, the hard drive that chugged, hummed and clicked in the metal casing or on the easily transportable floppy disk, a somewhat larger-format forerunner of the much later USB stick. It was also practical to retrieve additional information, which meant the soon-to-be established Internet or my first source, the encyclopaedia on data media. Additional knowledge that I need to understand what I have read and would not like to look up in a printed encyclopaedia, because then I would have to get up from my reading chair, put the reading material aside and leaf through the encyclopaedia’s links, which at that time were still textual cross-references and not hyperlinks as electronic jump references. Which, at the time of my speech, would mean a terrible manual flipping back and forth with the kilogram mostly heavy printed work and would take up a lot of my time, probably a good part of my free afternoon.
With my new computer system, apart from the obligatory floppy disk drive for the 3.5-inch floppy disk – a flexible, magnetic, round polyester disk a few centimetres in diameter, coated with iron oxide, enclosed in a square black, grey or white plastic sleeve and allows access to the data on the magnetic disk by means of a mechanically movable metal locking plate of the reading light barrier in the disk drive – also acquired a CD-ROM drive, together with the programmes stored on five to six floppy disks (strictly speaking, it was a comprehensive programme: MS-DOS 5. 0 as the operating system and the graphic user interface Windows 3.1), all of which promised to make the computer system usable and fill the screen and the eyes with colour. Among them was a Compact Disc, or CD for short, to be inserted into the CD-ROM drive, with an encyclopaedia stored on it, or rather a more comprehensive encyclopaedia with up to fifty thousand articles in the later years of its publication by Microsoft (Source: Wikipedia, Encarta), which I had previously only known in this form in printed form and in exemplary fashion from the Brockhaus publishing house, the Brockhaus in more than twelve volumes, from the municipal library. The Microsoft Encarta, the first edition in 1993, I believe in my memory, was a five-hundred-megabyte CD, voluminous by the standards of the time, as the digital encyclopaedia of choice for the education-conscious private person. I had bought it in one of the computer shops for one hundred German marks (DM), the currency before the euro (€). Smaller, often tucked away shops in the city districts, ranging from copy and stationery to bookshops, which, in addition to the still rare larger computer shops in the centre, had recently expanded their previous stock of goods to include the digital with accessories such as floppy disks, print cartridges & co and portable EDP such as laptops and PDAs and in the years after the millennium, due to the spread of online trade on the established Internet, they returned as quietly as they had come to the almost original assortment. It would be practical, I thought to myself, unaware of all these things and sipping my coffee, to be able to look up what the encyclopaedia has to say about the feuilleton I was reading about Don Quixote by Miguel de Cervantes, a Spanish author of world literature. It would have made more sense to read about Gottfried von Berlichingen, the last knight-hoodlum whose profession was feuding, but this article was simply about a sad figure. I imagined the state of computer use, still unattainable in my even present time, like this. I would be sitting in my armchair leafing through a newspaper in a handier format than the Nordic, the common format of the daily newspaper I was reading, and whose difference from a so-called classic newspaper, meaning a paper newspaper, would be that it would be electronic and digital. A computer with a screencast in one piece, the computer electronics and circuit board mounted directly below the screen, along with a CD-ROM drive for the encyclopaedia. The device had to be flat, as flat as possible. I thought of such things that were circulating in technology at the time, like nanotechnology and Newton computers. So, a Newton, the imitation is the master of all things, first the copy and then the leader with an expanded idea. My strange instrument – my armchair was right next to my stereo for listening to classical music, and so I gave my idea the headline – would have to be flat, somehow nanotechnological, that meant smaller than 1.969 Zoll in thickness. The screen, I squinted two years later in the follow-up to my idea at an educational book similar to a glued brochure and bound with thread in a solid cardboard cover covered with glossy foil, a hardcover edition in terms of book development, should be about eleven inches diagonal. Yes, and light it should be. Not like a heavy tome that I only read opened up on the kitchen table because its contents, like its weight, are more conducive to a morning physical workout.* I made a handwritten sketch in my paper notebook with a biro. The sketch was lost to me with the lesser notes of my diary in later years, leaving me only with a digital drawing made with Microsoft Word in 1997, which I attach below this essay. The first tablet, the first tablet computer conceived by a complete layman far removed from any access to technical details and patent information had become. I shook the too-long sleeve of my cardigan at this nice idea and called my imagination „Tableau“, which means tablet in Austria, Switzerland and France. Just the right shelf for my impression of knowledge and education along with the spirit of the coffee cup. It is April 1994, a Saturday with friendly sunshine and spring fever.
* A little later in the years, but still in the fading nineties before the millennium break, the millennium (a word rarely used for lack of opportunity), I formulated the term Chair-reader (dt(sch) Sesselleser) and the term Desk-reader (dt(sch) Schreibtischleser). Each of the terms illustrates a different way of handling a tablet, which is also mentally conditioned. The Chair-reader is a thinker, visionary and literary on the move with his tablet. He needs the, well, almost meditative posture of a reader in an armchair or on the couch. His back is upright, his arms resting on his crossed leg with the light tablet in his hands. The Desk-reader, on the other hand, would correspond to the office worker of today at the desk in front of the screen. Both postures represent a different approach to things that can be done with a tablet and the results associated with it. The preliminary work in the armchair and the pure work at the desk. The mental grasping of important contents of a digital document with the tablet and the decision in the execution at the desk screen. Concentrated in the armchair as active at the desk.
Epilogue
In 1997, I decided to send my idea and impulse to a market-leading company active worldwide in the information sector, in order to point out to them the one way to my gadget. To the best of my knowledge, no one had yet come up with the idea of creating or, in my case, visualising a personal computer that was handy and that could really be used personally by its user sitting in his armchair or away from the couch as if he were reading, looking at, taking notes and leafing through the pages with his computer or tablet. After a few weeks, the company wrote to me saying that they had enough expertise to be able to help me in my matter. After a bit of reflection on my letter-writing success, I decided to leave this imagination as it was most reasonable by my standards, namely as a friendly hint for more. And in doing so, I happily escaped the then prevailing sense of optimism that anyone could be a pioneer with a clever mind in this information technology field that had now been generally accessible to culture for less than a decade, for there were still some economic niches of this, because culturally new, particular economic ecosystem unoccupied and the tragedy thus remained unwritten for me. I remained grateful and followed the course of technical development with excitement until 2010, when Steve Jobs presented the first tablet computer that could be used in everyday life, Apple’s iPad, as a milestone in commercialised computer technology. And continue to follow until today the progress of the technical evolution to the foldable devices, which just in January and February 2019 – with increasing market success and already more technically sophisticated in 2023 – as the foldable smartphone, the Foldable, hint at the expansion and future possible complete replacement of the tablet computers used in private and administrative everyday life. My strange instrument, an early vision of the future that will accompany people in their everyday lives forever.
Apology: The author is not a proofreader, nor a Germanist or really good english speaker, in general writing is a trouble for him and it is not his profession. Rather, it was circumstances, from wherever, that pushed him to write it down and so he wrote and corrected over three years from 2018 to 2023 to tell his idea that occurred to him thirty years ago. The published text is certainly not entirely free of orthographic errors.
NOTE: I ASSURE THAT THIS TEXT WAS FORMULATE ENTIRELY WITHOUT THE AID OF ANY ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE. * Created with Vivaldi Browser in Vivaldi.Net WordPress Editor. Wolkem_Blog / March 2023
