It was very interesting to read this article since it was published in 1977. Many of the concepts and tools included in the Dynabook were precursors to standard/popular applications for laptops, tablets, and smartphones of today. One statement that made me think was the worry that the Dynabook and future devices, might "collapse under the weight of trying to be too many different tools for too many people" (403-404). Concerns about storing all that data and maintaining fast processing speeds were a much larger problem then than they are now. Modern laptops and tablets have dozen of apps and programs to use, and I think most of us don't worry about having too many. And there are so many out there now ("there's an app for that!")–sophisticated tools for audio editing, such as Audacity, or drawing programs such as MS Paint, and Flash for animation. And all of these can run on the average laptop. We've come a long way from Dynabook.
There was another interesting idea in the reading, that "the computer, when viewed as a medium itself, can be all other media if the embedding and the viewing are sufficiently well provided" (393-394). I think this is becoming more and more true. Think of email; that can be analogous to snail mail, but now it's instantaneous. Music: before we only created music through tangible instruments that depended on strings, valves, mallets, sticks, our voices. But with computers came the birth of electronic music, bringing forth new sounds like smooth synths and deep bass drops. Even in the visual art world, digital media is becoming more and more relevant. Painters and illustrators are no longer restricted to pencils, inks, and pigments; many of them draw using digital drawing tablets in programs such as Corel Painter, and their work comes out just as awesome as traditional media. All this is pretty amazing when you think about how people come up with new and different forms of media.
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