Alan Kay's 1972 paper on the Dynabook [1] is very interesting how he designed the Dynabook from the perspective of what you'd want in a personal computer, and t

Alan Kay's 1972 paper on the Dynabook [1] is very interesting how he designed the Dynabook from the perspective of what you'd want in a personal computer, and then described in detail what technology improvements would be needed to get there, and how to get the price down to $500. It's important to remember that the Alto was called the "interim Dynabook", a system to try out the Dynabook ideas until technology caught up and made a Dynabook-like system possible (40 years later). [1] http://history-computer.com/Library/Kay72.pdf http://history-computer.com/Library/Kay72.pdf - jump ahead to page 6 for the hardware details