Generative Art Timeline · Chapter 5: Artist-Programmer Era (1970s)

1977

Alan Kay and Adele Goldberg of PARC Publish "Personal Dynamic Media”

Publication · North America

The original Personal Dynamic Media opening page pairs a black title block with a cartoon painter using a computer, above two columns of text.
Alan Kay and Adele Goldberg, Personal Dynamic Media, opening page in Computer, March 1977, p. 31. Alan Kay and Adele Goldberg / Xerox Palo Alto Research Center. Computer, IEEE, March 1977. Scan supplied by Viewpoints Research Institute, memo M-1977-001. Image source.

This paper conceived of the laptop and tablet computers decades before their existence. It outlines the goals and developments of Kay and Goldberg’s “dream” to create a portable computer the size of a “notebook,” which they called the Dynabook. Mock-ups of the Dynabook were decades ahead of their time. It looked more like a tablet than today’s “notebook” computers. The device was designed for artists in particular, as its sketch pad like design facilitated hand drawing and painting. It also theoretically included software for the creation of animation and music. It wasn’t until after a decade of early attempts in the 1980s that Apple would produce the PowerBook in 1991 and IBM the ThinkPad in 1992 that the vision of the Dynabook even started to be fulfilled. It was not until 2010 that Apple would introduce the iPad

Text by Peter Bauman. Generative Art Timeline, Le Random, fact-checked September 2026.

Sources

People

Adele Goldberg, Alan Kay

Movements

Technology and Art

Filed under

Ideas
animation, computing history, drawing, interfaces, music, painting, Technology and Art, tools
Technologies
Dynabook, Human-Computer Interaction, iPad, laptops, PowerBook, tablets, ThinkPad
People
Adele Goldberg, Alan Kay
Works
Personal Dynamic Media
Organisations
Apple, IBM, Xerox PARC

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