He was designing a computer as if he were a humanist as well as an engineer. He drew inspiration from an Italian printer in the early sixteenth century named Aldus Manutius, who realized that personal books would need to fit into saddlebags and thus produced ones of the size now common. Likewise, Kay recognized that the ideal personal computer had to be no larger than a notebook. “It was easy to know what to do next,” he recalled. “I built a cardboard model of it to see what it would look and feel like.”52
