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This device is more than just a display device. It is a very powerful computer. I was impressed by the clever use for the spine, which not only connects the LCD pages, but also is the brain for the device. And shouldn't the "spine" of a book contain the nervous system of the book, just like a backbone should?
The Runcible could effortlessly become any book you wanted. More than that, it was a full-fledged computing device. This is not Alan Kay's 1968 Dynabook, the model for most e-book hardware that you see today; the Dynabook was essentially a book with a single page.
MIT's Media Lab had a project called The Last Book to create the same book. The MIT information I can find is dated no earlier than 1997 - I don't know if Stephenson's Runcible preceded their developments or not.
We have only had flat screen LCDs on computers for 20 years or so; we have not yet achieved affordable flat-as-paper displays. And none of these displays offer the high contrast of ink on paper. Perhaps it is jumping the gun to speculate what will come next, but that is the province of science fiction writers.
Books, of course, evolved from scrolls. A scroll was a long, continuous strip of material that was, in many ways, cumbersome to make and to use. Books consisting of cut-up pieces of scroll (so to speak) were cheaper to make and had certain advantages. Chief among these advantages (from a computer geek point of view) is that a book is a random access device; that is, you can open it readily to the place you want. A scroll must be carefully unrolled to the appropriate point, which can be a very time-consuming process (as anyone who has watched a series of Torah readings at a bar mitzvah can attest!). Also, while you can only use one side of the material in a scroll, you can use both sides of the paper in a book.
It is an interesting side note that today we "scroll" a long web page or a long document on our short computer screen. Unless the author has provided us with a page index, we cannot access what we want without scrolling past unwanted material. A runcible would allow you to go directly to the part of the document you wanted. It would also preserve the excellent usability characteristics of books - as the MIT guys say:
As it happens, Runcible was also an early system for mathematics on the IBM 650 computer.
I should also mention that in the Inspector Gadget cartoon series, which aired in 1983-5, Gadget's niece Penny had a special computer book that offered similar features.
You can also start the video at 0:16 for more views. See also this review of the Lenovo Thinkpad X1 Fold for a quick reference to the electronic book idea.
Compare to the powered print-book from Prelude to Foundation (1988) by Isaac Asimov. Comment/Join this discussion ( 4 ) | RSS/XML | Blog This | Additional
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Science Fiction
Timeline
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