Jon Udell: Apple's Knowledge Navigator revisited. Jon's post links to and discusses some points in a fanciful Apple concept video from 1988 about Knowledge Navigator. In the video, a man (a professor) comes into a den and opens up a flat notebook computer (like a tablet PC, but probably closer in vision to the Dynabook and the Newton.
Some of the knowledge navigator's features are here, as Jon points out - the proliferation of wireless internet connectivity, small yet powerful laptops, working video-chat solutions (ie, Apple's iChat AV and well crafted iSight camera), and resources like Google.
Some of the Knowledge Navigator's concepts started showing up in the Newton, primarily the intelligent communication. You could scribble a note, such as "Dinner with Joan," tap an icon, and it would examine the text and make an entry in your calendar in the evening with a link to Joan's contact information (asking you to find the correct Joan if there was more than one match). By my understanding, the Newton treated everything as one big "soup" of data, always available for finding and linking. Palm Desktop on the Mac (a rebranded version of Claris' Organizer) had similar intelligence built in (again - if memory serves me correctly). And I've seen programs for the Palm OS and for Microsoft Outlook that could do similar things. But the effect was never as cool as it was on The Newton. It was really meant to be a personal assistant, something you could put data into and pull back out of regardless of where it went. I don't know how well third party Newton applications played with "The Soup" but I hope that it was a pervasive concept.
The Newton OS was one of the most daring new OS's I've seen come out since the original Lisa Office System (the Mac OS was very stripped down in comparison to what the Lisa could do). There are still so many ideas from Lisa, OpenDoc, the Newton, DynaBook, and even some bits of the original NeXTStep that seem so far away.
It's as though we never really go forward, but we sure go sideways a lot. I have some more thoughts on this, but I'm waiting for Panther to arrive to see what new it offers me to see if it really makes progress, or just does some cool (and useful) tricks.