Bill Buxton's Notes

The Momenta was a system that was generating a lot of excitement. As with the Active Book, a lot of the UI was done in Smalltalk, and it may have been the first commercial system to use radial (or pie) menus. We got a development system at the University of Toronto, but the company went broke very soon after shipping, so we never got the final product. They are extremely rare, so it took me a long time to find this one. Could the company have survived? Impossible to say. What I find interesting was how different their industrial design was than anyone else's. Perhaps they tried too hard and got over extended. The resulting hardware was a bit to fiddly for my taste—but that is through today's eyes. The founder has written a fair bit about the experience, and I believe that the case studies are worth reading by would-be entrepreneurs.