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Auxilliary display - a tribute to Uncle Clive Sinclair?

I really ought to start patenting some of my ideas. It was while looking at the Sinclair Z88 notebook, nearly twenty years ago, that I first asked IBM to include a display on the outside of every notebook, if they ever made a notebook, that is.

Those days, the days of the Tandy 100, were the days when you could read a computer screen in sunlight; reflective LCD doesn't need a backlight that burns through the battery.

"Put the LCD on the lid, and run a secondary processor, just enough to capture typing keystrokes," I pleaded.

Apparently, that's what Microsoft showed at the recent Intel Developer Forum; and will be announcing today at WinHec.That is, simply an LCD display on the outside of the lid.

Batteries in the new Tablet which Bill Gates is announcing today at Winhec will last a whole day (he says).

It will also be remarkable for the fact that it has a built-in speech chip - capable of doing 64-bit recognition, without bothering the central Pentium. The chip is designed by Viewsonic, which put most of the original Tablet design together.

In a world where even humans can't understand speech clearly, I'm sticking to my earlier request: please, Bill - put a keyboard on the outside of the notebook too.

I want all the power of the best Pentium M, truly I do, for odd things. But for 90% of my time, I'm just tapping away, recording thoughts. I used to do that on my old Z88, and the batteries lasted a month.

An Eleksen fabric strip on the lid is all we need!