When illness drove me out of high school and I began my course of independent education I faced a serious problem. Books, because of the toxins common to kraft process bleached paper and modern inks and the dusts and fungus they accumulate with age, were themselves a contributor to my illness and, always being an avid reader, I had a lot of them. This became a persistant problem with few practical solutions. Air purifiers allowed me to keep a modest amount of paper and books at hand but most had to be kept stored in polyethylene boxes in an isolated room which made casual reference impossible -especially since my poor stamina made shifting the heavy boxes around very difficult and the room was in a part of my relative's home that had no heating or ventilation and was extremely cold in the winter and extremely hot in summer. Since the obscenely high cost of American textbooks forced me to sell a lot of possessions to pay for them there was a certain consolidation in the amount of books I had to deal with but in general the problem remained and seemed likely to get only worse with time. (I did find that English language textbooks from Russia were MUCH cheaper and sometimes superior in content, especially in the subjects of astronomy and engineering, but the range of subjects was limited and the only mail-order source for them here did not last long)

It was clear to me that I needed a much better solution and since my studies were computer focused I considered that technology as a possible answer. In the early 1980s the concept of the Paperless Office was all the rage, even though not a single one of the many American computer companies that touted its virtues ever managed to demonstrate a practical platform for it and such projects as Ted nelson's Xanadu floundered for lack of concerted industry support. It seemed to me, though, that these many failures were due to design and not technology as a result of the rather obvious inability of computer designers to fully comprehend the ergonomics of the book as an information medium. They were taking the nonsensical approach of treating books as mere storage devices for text that could be replaced by disks, failing to take into account their equally important function as a presentation medium whose subtly sophisticated ergonomics had evolved over centuries. Thus began my personal quest to develop a practical electronic book platform which could overcome my problems with paper.

As I saw it, the three critical elements of a paperless book platform were information input, storage, and presentation. The first two issues were being fairly well addressed by the technologies of digital image scanners, text recognition software, and optical disk systems which were all evolving and improving in performance at a fairly good pace. And while converting a paper book to digital form using flat bed scanners might always be a somewhat tedious task, a steadily increasing number of books were being written and composed with computers. I anticipated that writing and publishing of new books would become a virtually 100% digital process by the end of the 80s -and I was exactly right. However, a medium for effective digital book presentation was a much tougher nut to crack. I realized that for the computer to be an effective medium for _reading_ it had to assume book-like ergonomics and that's not so simple. CRT displays were not a good technology for this because their optical ergonomics were all wrong. They were bad for the eyes, set at the wrong angle, had the wrong aspect ratio, and with early computers, drastically insufficient resolution. What was needed was a new kind of display. An interactive flat panel display which could be held in the hands like a book and manipulated directly by touch in the same way that paper books are. This way one could more readily approximate the ergonomics of the book, in particular its ability to display information in pages rather than scrolling it vertically across some imaginary plane -fatiguing to the eyes and bad for concentration.

Unfortunately, the display technology of the time was very primitive and slow to evolve. Even now this remains the case, largely because American computer companies dropped the ball in the 1980s. They allowed the fledgling US flat panel display industry to collapse because they lacked the vision necessary to see any practical product applications for FPDs until the Japanese -who built their flat panel display industry directly from the technology and facilities they scavenged from bankrupt American FPD companies- introduced a wave of laptop computers that caught the US computer industry with its pants down.

For many years I struggled in a futile attempt to cobble-together simple interactive displays from available technology. I focussed on non-portable systems which would use interactive displays of at least one full letter page in area tethered to a companion personal computer. I also worked on the issue of software design as best I could using a Macintosh. (the computer chosen for being both the most book-like and having the lowest polychloride biphenyl emissions of any desktop computer of the time) I even had articles on the subject of digital book software design published in the Apple Library Users Group Journal. But FPDs of that size were rare and costly. My lack of income and workshop space meant I needed help to do this and, invariably, I was frustrated in my efforts by computer company executives who just could never 'get it'.

TouchScreen interactive display panel I had two near successes. One was with a proposal to Apple to manufacture an interactive display panel called the TouchScreen as an add-on for the Macintosh, assembled from a select matching set of off-the-shelf components I had discovered. Using these it was possible to simply assemble by hand these display units, which I proposed doing as a home based business. An engineer in Apple had already proposed the same device which he had scratch-built a prototype for. He briefly served as my advocate to the company for this idea but the execs eventually killed it because they couldn't imagine any market for it -despite the great enthusiasm the prototype unit has generated among Apple staff that had used it. They only understood the concept of a display tablet as an all-in-one portable computer rather than a peripheral for desktop devices and, at the time, they weren't prepared to make a tablet computer.

My other near success was when the president of a start-up company making Liquid Crystal Light Valve Displays offered to allow me to be a beta tester for a drafting table sized display and digitizer system called the Lightouch. LCLV displays are a technology which predates and far surpasses in performance today's LCD technology. At that time used primarily for military 'situation rooms', in digital cartography, and as paperless CAD plotters, LCLV displays readily afforded resolutions in excess of 300dpi with additive color of potentially unlimited color depth and screen areas as big as a movie theater screen. Then, and now, they far surpassed the graphics capabilities of the most powerful computers. Though typically made large, they could readily be fit into packages similar to a CRT but with only a fraction of the weight and power overhead. Why this technology never obsolesced the CRT long before cheap LCDs appeared remains a complete mystery to me -well, except for my long observation that computer industry executives are generally utterly oblivious to the actual range of off-the-shelf technology available to them. The Lightouch was a large product, supporting a screen area of 8 letter pages with a 1000dpi transparent digitizer acting as its rear projection screen. Though bulky and over-kill as an interactive display, it would have served me well. Unfortunately, the president of the company ignored my advice that they market this product to the emerging desktop publishing market and instead they focussed on the all-too-narrow market of medical imaging. The company went bankrupt and was bought out by another before the first Lightouch rolled off the assembly lines, thus ruining my chance to get one.

With the cost of large area FPD so great, I began looking to the design of systems that could make use of smaller displays approximating the geometry of the paperback novel page. But there was a curious complication with this. While smaller FPDs were more common and much cheaper, touch screens and display interfaces for them were not, the manufacturers of those favoring the larger rarer displays for their off-the-shelf components. So it proved too difficult to develop an interactive display as a peripheral unless it was using the large displays these off-the-shelf parts were made to support. Thus I had to start looking at a smaller self-contained computer concept.

Gutenbuch portable e-book device

My first design of this type was a device called the Gutenbuch which was featured in articles in Midnight Engineering magazine. The Gutenbuch is the first ever design for a device which would later come to be called a PDA. Designed with the intent of being as cheap as possible and using relatively low-tech components to their most practical performance, the device featured a paperback novel size grayscale LCD display and a data cassette tape drive derived from the very simple technology of early personal computers but enhanced for higher speeds and data density. Cassette tapes were also a medium already well represented in book stores of the time and easy to mass duplicate -CDs not yet being readily available then. However, in anticipation of these new mass storage technologies the tape drive was designed as a modular attachment which could be replaced by other devices -including modems- as needed. Dedicated to the task of a book display with additional personal assistant functions, the limited random access speeds of tape was considered nominal because books are normally read serially. A great deal of data compression was to be gained by using a unique text encoding method that would rely on the Gutenbuch's ROM holding a dictionary of most common words to which would be assigned a byte code -a technology that had already been developed by another inventor with the intent of broadcasting digital newspapers by radio on a sub-carrier of standard radio channels. Had the Gutenbuch been taken seriously it would have re-written the history of the PDA as it exists today.

JoeyPAD

My next design attempt was for a more open platform system dubbed the JoeyPAD. The JoeyPAD was designed to be a more multi-purpose device that could function both as an independent computer and as a front-end PAD for a ubiquitous computing environment. Realizing that adoption of an electronic book platform was going to be contingent on sneaking it into an already established portable computer market, the JoeyPAD was designed for maximum application flexibility, the idea being to promote it as the ultimate adaptable portable computer and network appliance. To this end the design featured four open-packed double-slot PCMCIA card ports with integral battery connectors and two interchangeable keypad modules. Using open-backed PC-card ports allowed the device to support all the sizes of conventional PC-cards as well as external add-on modules or wall mounts of any size and shape which would interface through the PC-card ports via a PCMCIA connector 'shoe'. The keypad modules were designed to be swappable for right and left handed users and featured a chord keypad which would allow typing while walking and a cursor pad used like a cursor key or game controller. Larger keypad modules could also be accommodated, allowing the device to function like a laptop with full QWERTY keyboard or with any number of different specialized keypads. With such flexibility in hardware the device could be used for everything from a rugged hand-held word processor for students and journalists to a general use PDA to a snap-on control panel for industrial devices and robots.

A key element of the JoeyPAD design was a software platform dubbed Tapestry which was designed to make the most of simple processors like the Java bytecode based processors then being positioned as the basis for Internet appliances. Tapestry was intended to evolve XML into a self-contained threaded-interpreted software platform so that multimedia hypertext documents, application software, and system software could function alternately on-line or as stand-alone software. It used a web-browser-like but paginated document metaphor as the basis of the JoeyPAD user interface environment, the entire system environment and file structure presented as a threaded hypertext database composed in pages and document icons with the 'root' of the system being a 'system page' into which peripherals and system software components plugged-into. This unique software environment allowed a more-or-less seamless integration between local data resources and the Internet allowing the JoeyPAD to function with equal capability whether networked or not. I later evolved the Tapestry concept into a platform for Distributed Computing, anticipating but still more sophisticated than the network OSes currently being developed.

The JoeyPAD proved to be an impressive concept to everyone except the people I needed most to get it off the ground. My JoeyPAD presentation web site elicited numerous e-mail responses from people ready to order the device and even won an award for its design from MacAddict magazine. The LUF organization -then still known as the First Millennial Foundation- designated the JoeyPAD their official portable computing platform and plans were explored for its development. But what the JoeyPAD really needed was a commercial sponsor who could finance the product development. None ever materialized.

The current design for this system is called the Geode and originated as an idea presented on the JoeyPAD site which I called the M-Joey -'M' standing for 'monolithic.' The Geode design concept was developed as an entry for the Emhart/NASA design competition in 2003 and was intended to illustrate the cutting edge in possible portable computing technology. The Geode is essentially the same in underlying architecture as the JoeyPAD, being based on the Tapestry environment. But it features a hardware design unlike any electronic product ever devised to date. The Geode is based on a unique monolithic fabrication where two layered ceramic shells serve as host to surface-mount bare-chip circuitry an integrated pyrochromatic display with near-field-imaging touchscreen, and network antenna and inductive power transmission loops. The shells are built up in layers then machines to size. Once their chip hardware is bonded to the inside, the hollow space is filled with epoxy leaving a small gap which hosts layers of conductive plate and gel electrolyte to make an integral rechargeable power cell. The two shells are bonded together and their seam permanently sealed with ceramic filler, making a solid monolithic device of high durability that can operate in most any environment, from underwater to the vacuum of space.

All interface to the Geode is wireless, the device supporting both a local system bus network and a more conventional wide area network interface. Wireless power is provided by an induction loop which allows a simple stand to provide power or recharge the integral power cell. Geode supports an infinite variety of peripherals based on the same fabrication method which link to the wireless system bus by being brought into sufficient proximity and having their fixed hardware IDs set to be recognized by the parent Geode unit. This same mechanism allows for sharing of peripherals by multiple Geodes in the same area. The most common Geode peripherals are keypads, such as a unique circular chord keypad, and data cards which are akin to portable hard drives and feature their own display to list their data contents.

Altogether the Geode is about 5-10 years ahead of the current state of the art in portable computers and would give industry leadership position to any company developing it. Its unique fabrication technology would also have application with countless other consumer and industrial electronic products. Of course, personal experience leaves me doubtful this product design will ever see realization. The American computer industry never gets it, and never will.