The KiddiComp concept, envisioned by Alan Kay on January 1, 1968 while a PhD candidate, and later developed and described as the Dynabook in his 1972 proposal "A personal computer for children of all ages",
In 1989, Toshiba released a sub-notebook computer called DynaBook, inspired by the concept. Kay was personally gifted a unit and was a guest of Toshiba. The company released notebook computers under the DynaBook brand in Japan; in 2018, Sharp acquired a majority stake in Toshiba's PC business, now named Dynabook Inc. and has marketed notebooks worldwide under the Dynabook name.
Original concept
thumb|Alan Kay holding the mockup of Dynabook, 2008
Describing the idea as "A Personal Computer For Children of All Ages", Kay wanted the Dynabook concept to embody the learning theories of Jerome Bruner and some of what Seymour Papert— who had studied with developmental psychologist Jean Piaget and was one of the inventors of the Logo programming language — was proposing. This concept was created two years before the founding of Xerox PARC. The ideas led to the development of the Xerox Alto prototype, which was originally called "the interim Dynabook". It embodied all the elements of a graphical user interface, or GUI, as early as 1972. The software component of this research was Smalltalk, which went on to have a life of its own independent of the Dynabook concept.
The hardware on which the programming environment ran was relatively irrelevant.
At the same time, Kay tried in his 1972 article to identify existing hardware components that could be used in a Dynabook, including screens, processors and storage memory. For example: