I picture it as a legal pad, more or less. If I really think about it, I imagine a "legal pad" as having that very specific paper (lined, with that nice margin), whereas a "tablet" could perhaps be any type of paper bound together in that same way.
I'm not entirely sure where I got these impressions from over the years, though I certainly used to use a lot of legal pads. I still really like stumbling across a nice one in the wild, even if I usually just get them from Amazon nowadays. (Aside: Is it just me, or are legal pads not as good these days as they used to be?)
Looks like paper tablets even predate that 1902 use. This source has newspaper ads for "Pencil Tablets" and "Writing Tablets": bound ruled and un-ruled paper with and without covers from 1894-1895: https://www.kristinholt.com/archives/3205
I wonder if binding at the top was necessary to be called a tablet? Or perforation to easily tear off sheets?
I was looking to see how long ago marble composition notebooks (which are side-bound) were created and what they were called and it looks like they existed in the mid-1800s but I couldn't find any evidence they were called tablets.
The technology does seem interesting. But what's the monetization model?
It looks like it's marketed towards fitting in to the construction process. So I suppose it could monetize as just another construction contractor? But that would mean effectively just a set amount of money per "job," rather than any sort of truly recurring revenue.
This question is one of a whole genre of "why" questions that come from supposed pragmatists, but I can't help but think the existence of the question misses the entire point.
Luckily, one of the older questions of this genre was about why anyone would bother to climb Mount Everest, and ol' Mallory had such a good answer that I'll just paste the whole thing here:
> People ask me, 'What is the use of climbing Mount Everest?' and my answer must at once be, 'It is of no use.' There is not the slightest prospect of any gain whatsoever. Oh, we may learn a little about the behavior of the human body at high altitudes, and possibly medical men may turn our observation to some account for the purposes of aviation. But otherwise nothing will come of it. We shall not bring back a single bit of gold or silver, not a gem, nor any coal or iron.
> If you cannot understand that there is something in man which responds to the challenge of this mountain and goes out to meet it, that the struggle is the struggle of life itself upward and forever upward, then you won't see why we go. What we get from this adventure is just sheer joy. And joy is, after all, the end of life. We do not live to eat and make money. We eat and make money to be able to live. That is what life means and what life is for.
Of course, with Venus, there's the joy of exploration and also tons of profits and learning to be had. For example, we could cover the entire planet in giant ads. Think of the CPMs you'd get as people looked out the window on their way to Mercury!
We choose to go to the Moon ... and do the other things, not because they are easy, but because they are hard; because that goal will serve to organize and measure the best of our energies and skills, because that challenge is one that we are willing to accept, one we are unwilling to postpone, and one we intend to win
And because if we don't beat Russia there we're all going to look less good on the global stage, and we simply can't have that. Wait, can we edit that out in post?
On some level I agree with the spirit. But I also think it implicitly concedes that there's not good reasons otherwise, which sells it too short. Existential threats to humanity seem like a pretty good reason, to the point that if reasons mean anything at all it should count as one.
A lot of companies gravitate towards putting more and more into Slack. It has a tendency to take over email. The integrations also just accelerate that process.
If you can convince people to put everything in "project rooms" (or "team rooms" or whatever) instead of DMs, then you effectively end up with the ability to search all the historical knowledge of the company.
Human nature admits a spectrum of outcomes on this, and I'd argue that most humans are not in fact pathologically acquisitive and power obsessed. Most humans value high status, but healthy societies confer high status in ways de-coupled from counterproductive Putinism. The people who attended the fifth Solvay Conference (that famous photo), who ran the Manhattan Project, who put men on the moon (or went) all were fabulously high status for good reasons with incentives that served society rather than parisitizing it. Those people got to be admired and enjoy the privileges of high status without bankrupting the body politic for countless commas.
This Bezos-style hyperaquisition isn't new exactly but it's not the constant norm its currently made out to be: its a sociecal failure mode with clear precedent but by no means a constant and its not at all obvious that it's inevitable.
I’d agree that most humans are not pathological power seekers; however I believe that’s exactly why we end up with successful pathological power seekers.
Like the world is learning with nukes, you cannot rely on the powerful for mercy. You can only rely on the powerful to grasp for more power and the only way to stop them is to yourself be as strong as possible.
If a utopia ever exists, it will only be because of a stalemate arms race (see: no nuclear powers have had an open war). Peaceful utopia is otherwise too easily disrupted by a single asshole with a big stick.
> It's usually possible for the person running a small project to ask everyone for status
Perhaps, for efficiency, they could ask everyone simultaneously in parallel, or at least roughly around the same time?
To maximize creativity and opportunity, perhaps we could then figure out some way to share each person's status update with every other person on the team?
I'm not entirely sure where I got these impressions from over the years, though I certainly used to use a lot of legal pads. I still really like stumbling across a nice one in the wild, even if I usually just get them from Amazon nowadays. (Aside: Is it just me, or are legal pads not as good these days as they used to be?)
Anyway, from this bit on Wikipedia about legal pads, it seems like that is one origin story for using "tablet" in this context: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Notebook#Legal_pad
Notably, from the last sentence of that story:
> ...he glued together a stack of halved sheets of paper, supported by a sheet of cardboard, creating what he called the "Silver City Writing Tablet".