Alan Kay Quotes

The best way to predict the future is to invent it.

The most disastrous thing that you can ever learn is your first programming language.

A change in perspective is worth 80 IQ points.

Technology is anything invented after you were born.

Simple things should be simple, complex things should be possible.

I don't know how many of you have ever met Dijkstra, but you probably know that arrogance in computer science is measured in nano-Dijkstras.

Scratch the surface in a typical boardroom and we're all just cavemen with briefcases, hungry for a wise person to tell us stories.

Don't worry about what anybody else is going to do. The best way to predict the future is to invent it.

People who are really serious about software should make their own hardware.

It's easier to invent the future than to predict it.

Some people worry that artificial intelligence will make us feel inferior, but then, anybody in his right mind should have an inferiority complex every time he looks at a flower.

It’s easier to invent the future than to predict it.” —Alan Kay

In natural science, Nature has given us a world and we’re just to discover its laws. In computers, we can stuff laws into it and create a world.

The best way to predict the future is to invent it. ALAN KAY, XEROX PARC

The Internet was done so well that most people think of it as a natural resource like the Pacific Ocean, rather than something that was man-made. When was the last time a technology with a scale like that was so error-free? The Web, in comparison, is a joke. The Web was done by amateurs.

Normal is the greatest enemy with regard to creating the new. And the way of getting around this is you have to understand normal not as reality, but just a construct. And a way to do that, for example, is just travel to a lot of different countries and you'll find a thousand different ways of thinking the world is real, all of which are just stories inside of people's heads. That's what we are too. Normal is just a construct, and to the extent that you can see normal as a construct in yourself, you have freed yourself from the constraints of thinking this is the way the world is. Because it isn't. This is the way we are.

The future is not laid out on a track. It is something that we can decide, and to the extent that we do not violate any known laws of the universe, we can probably make it work the way that we want to.

Law 6: When forced to compromise, ask for more. Law 7: If you can’t win, change the rules. Law 8: If you can’t change the rules, then ignore them. Law 11: “No” simply means begin again at one level higher. Law 13: When in doubt: THINK. Law 16: The faster you move, the slower time passes, the longer you live. Law 17: The best way to predict the future is to create it yourself. (adopted from Alan Kay) Law 19: You get what you incentivize. Law 22: The day before something is a breakthrough, it’s a crazy idea. Law 26: If you can’t measure it, you can’t improve it.

The best way to predict the future is to invent it." – Alan Kay

Alan Kay quips, “The best way to predict the future is to invent it.

Steve Jobs built on the work of Alan Kay, who built on Doug Engelbart, who built on J. C. R. Licklider and Vannevar Bush.

Among its visionaries was the scientist Alan Kay, who had two great maxims that Jobs embraced: “The best way to predict the future is to invent it” and “People who are serious about software should make their own hardware.

Television is the last technology we should be allowed to invent and put out without a surgeon general’s warning.

Like the ski resort of girls looking for husbands and husbands looking for girls, the situation is not as symmetrical as it might seem.

Steve. PAUL REINHOLD JOBS. Wisconsin-born Coast Guard seaman who, with his wife, Clara, adopted Steve in 1955. REED JOBS. Oldest child of Steve Jobs and Laurene Powell. RON JOHNSON. Hired by Jobs in 2000 to develop Apple’s stores. JEFFREY KATZENBERG. Head of Disney Studios, clashed with Eisner and resigned in 1994 to cofound DreamWorks SKG. ALAN KAY. Creative

Most people have managed to get by without being educated…because, in order to make education more user-friendly, they managed to forget about the changes in people’s brains that are supposed to happen.

REINHOLD JOBS. Wisconsin-born Coast Guard seaman who, with his wife, Clara, adopted Steve in 1955. REED JOBS. Oldest child of Steve Jobs and Laurene Powell. RON JOHNSON. Hired by Jobs in 2000 to develop Apple’s stores. JEFFREY KATZENBERG. Head of Disney Studios, clashed with Eisner and resigned in 1994 to cofound DreamWorks SKG. ALAN KAY. Creative and colorful computer pioneer who envisioned early personal computers, helped arrange Jobs’s Xerox PARC visit and his purchase of Pixar. DANIEL KOTTKE. Jobs’s closest friend at Reed, fellow pilgrim to India, early Apple employee. JOHN LASSETER. Cofounder and creative force at Pixar. DAN’L LEWIN. Marketing exec with Jobs at Apple and then NeXT. MIKE MARKKULA. First big Apple investor and chairman, a father figure to Jobs. REGIS MCKENNA. Publicity whiz who guided Jobs early on and remained a trusted advisor. MIKE MURRAY. Early Macintosh marketing director. PAUL OTELLINI. CEO of Intel who helped switch the Macintosh to Intel chips but did not get the iPhone business. LAURENE POWELL. Savvy and good-humored Penn graduate, went to Goldman Sachs and then Stanford Business School, married Steve Jobs in 1991. GEORGE RILEY. Jobs’s Memphis-born friend and lawyer. ARTHUR ROCK. Legendary tech investor, early Apple board member, Jobs’s father figure. JONATHAN “RUBY” RUBINSTEIN. Worked with Jobs at NeXT, became chief hardware engineer at Apple in 1997. MIKE SCOTT. Brought in by Markkula to be Apple’s president in 1977 to try to manage Jobs.

The Xerox Corporation’s Palo Alto Research Center, known as Xerox PARC, had been established in 1970 to create a spawning ground for digital ideas. It was safely located, for better and for worse, three thousand miles from the commercial pressures of Xerox corporate headquarters in Connecticut. Among its visionaries was the scientist Alan Kay, who had two great maxims that Jobs embraced: “The best way to predict the future is to invent it”and “People who are serious about software should make their own hardware.

When Jobs was losing his footing at Apple in the summer of 1985, he went for a walk with Alan Kay, who had been at Xerox PARC and was then an Apple Fellow. Kay knew that Jobs was interested in the intersection of creativity and technology, so he suggested they go see a friend of his, Ed Catmull, who was running the computer division of George Lucas’s film studio. They rented a limo and rode up to Marin County to the edge of Lucas’s Skywalker Ranch, where Catmull and his little computer division were based. “I was blown away, and I came back and tried to convince Sculley to buy it for Apple,” Jobs recalled. “But the folks running Apple weren’t interested, and they were busy kicking me out anyway.

Korie: I met Willie for the first time when we were in the third grade at Camp Ch-Yo-Ca, the camp I grew up at. Willie and Jase went to my session of the camp, and Alan came for high school week. Kay was cooking in the kitchen that summer, so her boys could attend the camp for free. I remember thinking Willie was the cutest thing I had ever seen and was so funny. We called him by his middle name, Jess, at the time. He had these big dimples and the cutest sideways smile. I had a diary that I never really wrote in, but that summer, I wrote: “I met a boy at summer camp and he was so cute. He asked me on the moonlight hike and I said ‘yes’!” I even wrote “Korie Loves Jess” on the bunk of the cabin I was staying in that summer. Yes, Willie asked me to go on the moonlight hike with him. It was always a big deal every summer figuring out which boy was going to ask you to accompany him on the moonlight hike, and I was thrilled when he asked me! Willie was definitely my first crush.

The Xerox Corporation’s Palo Alto Research Center, known as Xerox PARC, had been established in 1970 to create a spawning ground for digital ideas. It was safely located, for better and for worse, three thousand miles from the commercial pressures of Xerox corporate headquarters in Connecticut. Among its visionaries was the scientist Alan Kay, who had two great maxims that Jobs embraced: “The best way to predict the future is to invent it” and “People who are serious about software should make their own hardware.” Kay pushed the vision of a small personal computer, dubbed the “Dynabook,” that would be easy enough for children to use. So Xerox PARC’s engineers began to develop user-friendly graphics that could replace all of the command lines and DOS prompts that made computer screens intimidating. The metaphor they came up with was that of a desktop. The screen could have many documents and folders on it, and you could use a mouse to point and click on the one you wanted to use.

Answers to the Twenty Questions People Ask Us Most 1. Do you like the beards? Miss Kay: If Phil ever shaved his beard, I’d think I was committing adultery. Korie: When I married Willie, he was clean-shaven and had short hair. Boy, how things change! Over the years, I’ve really come to like the look he has now, including the beard. Missy: I love Jase. I don’t like the beard. I miss the days of scratch-free kisses. Besides, he’s just too cute under there! Jessica: Yes! Although Jep is really cute under all that hair, and although he does have the Robertson dimples, I still prefer the beard. I think sometime over the course of our marriage I transitioned to loving the beard. I do make him trim the mustache every once in a while for better kisses! I also feel safer with the beard; I know no one is going to mess with us because the beard kind of scares people. For some reason, I think they think he’s a madman! Lisa: Alan is often referred to as “the Robertson without a beard,” and I like it that way!

For whatever reason, Missy is the only Robertson wife who doesn’t like beards. Willie’s wife, Korie; Jep’s wife, Jessica; and Alan’s wife, Lisa, all love my brothers’ beards, and I’m pretty sure my mom, Kay, couldn’t imagine Phil without a beard because he has worn one for so long. But Missy is consistent in her distaste for facial hair. I hoped that one day my beard would, ahem, grow on her, but it hasn’t. Missy once tried to get me to shave by threatening not to shave her legs or under her arms. It actually worked once, but the next time I decided to call her bluff, and, well, she was bluffing.

Our sizable group was scattered among three different tables, and because the restaurant was a bit noisy, the kids’ table didn’t hear Alan lead us in the blessing. So Miss Kay went over to their table and led Mia and her cousins in their own prayer, thanking God for the food and asking Him to watch over Mia the next morning. After she finished, she asked the girls if they wanted to add anything. Mia said that she did. They all bowed their heads while Mia prayed for Mrs. Cathy, a dear friend of ours who was recovering from a recent mastectomy and undergoing chemotherapy for stage two breast cancer. Miss Kay came over to me and Jase with tears in her eyes, recounting what Mia had prayed. “I just assumed she was going to pray for herself, but she prayed for Cathy instead.” When I told Miss Kay that we pray for Cathy each night at bedtime, Kay said, “Well, I guess Mia thought there was no reason that this night should be any different.” She also mentioned that she asked Mia if she was nervous about the next day. “Not really” was Mia’s response. “But what do you feel?” Miss Kay asked her. “Nothing. I just don’t feel anything, really.” I guess I would interpret her response simply as Mia being at peace.

Miss Kay Alan had a run-in with the police one Sunday morning while he was in New Orleans and as best he can recall, one of the officers said to him, “Let me talk to you. What are your mom and dad doing right now?” “They’re in church, where they always go,” Alan answered. “I knew,” said the officer, “that you were raised different.” In other words, the policeman could tell Alan was not what some people might call a “common criminal.” The officer went on to speak some very strong words: “You have just done something really bad. Whatever you’re doing here, pack it up. Go home and live like your mom and dad; go live like you were raised. I don’t know your parents, but I have a feeling they will welcome you back like the Prodigal Son.” Phil and I had not been able to get through to Alan or influence him to change his ways while he was living with us, but that policeman in New Orleans sure got through to him. Sometimes we wonder if that policeman was an angel. Whether he was or was not, God definitely used him to get Alan back where he needed to be. Alan left “the Big Easy” right away and came back to us. He started walking with God again; he reconnected with Lisa. He and Phil began studying the Bible together; Phil baptized him in the river by our house, and he has been a totally different person ever since.

The thing I really like about Jase is that he’s as obsessed with ducks as I am. I rarely took my boys hunting with me when they were very young. In fact, I never took them when I was still an outlaw. “Not this time, boys, we might be running from the game warden,” I’d tell them. But after I repented and came to Jesus Christ, I started taking my sons hunting with me, beginning with Alan. Before we moved to where we live now, it was a pretty long haul from town to the Ouachita River bottoms. Alan got carsick nearly every time I took him hunting, but he didn’t think I knew. We stopped at the same gas station every time, and he’d walk around back and lose his breakfast before he climbed back into the truck. I was proud of him for never complaining. I took Jase hunting for the first time when he was five. He was shooting Pa’s heavy Belgium-made Browning twelve-gauge shotgun, which he could barely even hold up. It kicked like a mule! The first time Jase shot the gun, it kicked him to the back of the blind and flipped him over a bench. “Did I get him?” Jase asked. I knew right then that I had another hunter in the family, and Jase is still the most skilled hunter of all my boys. I trained Jase to take over the company by teaching him the nuances of duck calls and fowl hunting, and he is still the person in charge of making sure every duck call sounds like a duck. Not only did Jase design the first gadwall drake call to hit the market, he also invented the first triple-reed duck caller. Jase and I live to hunt ducks. We track ducks during the season through a nationwide network of hunters, asking how many ducks are in their areas and what movements are expected. Then we check conditions of wind and weather fronts that might influence duck movement. We talk it all over during the day and again each morning, before the day’s hunt, as we prepare to leave for the blind. When Kay and I began to ponder becoming less active in the Duck Commander business, we offered its management to Jase, who had been most deeply involved in the company. But he had no desire to get into management. Jase likes building duck calls and doesn’t really enjoy the business aspects of the company, like making sales calls or dealing with clients and sponsors. Like me, Jase is most comfortable when he’s in a duck blind and doesn’t care for the details that come with running a company. Jase only wants to build duck calls, shoot ducks, and spend time with his family (he and his wife, Missy, have three kids).

Alan Kay dijo: "la mejor forma de predecir el futuro es inventándolo".

É mais fácil inventar o futuro do que prevê-lo.” — Alan Kay

Not that Alan was being particularly subtle. Mallory was somewhat bemused to find herself, for the first time in her adult life, on the traditionally male side of things in their relationship: she was the one who was perfectly happy with casual sex a couple of times a week, no strings or promises. Alan wanted more.

There was literally flawless obedience when they were living under my roof-at least when I was home. If I told them to go to bed, they jumped up and went to bed. If I told them to rake the leaves, they raked the leaves. If I told them to clean the fish, they cleaned the fish. People would come over to visit us and were amazed at how obedient our sons were. Their teachers always told us our boys were among the most well-behaved students in school. I believe it’s because my boys were always aware of the consequences of not doing what they were told to do. They always respected me, and they respected their mother because I didn’t want them taking advantage of the woman who put them on Earth. I also didn’t allow my sons to fight with each other. They could argue and disagree all they wanted-and Jase and Willie managed to do it regularly. I didn’t have a problem with them raising their voices at each other to make a point. I wanted to encourage them to argue and make a case for their beliefs. But if it came to blows and there was meat popping, they were getting three licks each. I didn’t care who threw the first punch. If it ever came to physical blows, I’d step in and everybody involved got three licks. Another thing I didn’t allow was tearing up good hunting and fishing equipment. I wanted them to respect someone else’s property and to be thankful for what we had, even if it wasn’t much. If one of my boys borrowed one of my guns or fishing poles and tore it up while they were using it, they received three licks. I always wanted my boys to have access to my guns to hunt, just like I had access to Pa’s guns when I was growing up. When I was young, I knew if I broke a gun, we probably weren’t going to eat that night because we were so dependent on wild game for food. But since my boys knew there was going to be a meal on the table every night, they weren’t always as respectful of my equipment. When Alan was about fourteen, he and a few of his buddies borrowed all of my Browning shotguns to go bird-hunting. They were hunting on a muddy track and because they were careless and immature, mud got into a few of the shotgun barrels. They were very fortunate the guns still fired and didn’t blow up in their faces! When Alan returned home, he was so scared to tell me what happened to my Browning shotguns-my Holy Grails-that he enlisted Kay’s help to break the news. I’m sure Alan thought I was going to beat him on the spot, but I simply told him to go outside. I was afraid to whip him right then because I was so angry. After cooling off, I pulled Alan and his buddies together and gave them a stern lecture about gun safety and respecting other people’s property. I also told Alan-after I gave him three licks-that he was on probation from using my guns for a long time.

Willie was actually the one who brought the seriousness of Jep’s problem to our attention. Willie was working with the high school youth group at White’s Ferry Road Church, and he found out Jep had asked one of the kids to go to a bar with him. Willie came to our house and said, “I’m done. We’ve got to do something right now. I’m just tired of it.” We called Alan and decided to have a family intervention. Alan lined everything up, and we were all waiting for Jep when he came to the house one night. Kay was terrified because she was certain I was going to throw Jep out of the house, like I’d done with Alan. I told Jep, “Give me the keys to your truck-the one I’m paying for.” He pulled the keys out of his pocket and handed them to me. I told Jep what his brothers had told me about his behavior. “Son, you know what we stand for,” I told him. “We’re all trying to live for God. We’re not going to let you visit our home while you’re carrying on like this. We’re paying for your apartment. We’re paying for your truck. You’ve got a decision to make. You’re either going to come home and basically live under house arrest because we don’t trust you, or you can hit the road-with no vehicle, of course. Somebody can drop you off at the highway and then you’ll be on your own. You can go live your life; we’ll pray for you and hope that you come back one day. Those are your two choices.” Jep looked at me, lowered his head, and started pouring out his sins to me. He said he’d been taking pills, smoking marijuana, getting drunk, and on and on. He was crying the whole time, as he confessed his sins to us and God. I’ll never forget what Jep said next. He looked up at me and asked, “Dad, all I want to ask you is what took you so long to rescue me?” After Jep said that to me, everyone in the room was crying. “You still have a choice,” I told him. “Well, my choice is I want to come home,” he said.

Bezos also revered pioneering computer scientist Alan Kay and often quoted his observation that “point of view is worth 80 IQ points”—a reminder that looking at things in new ways can enhance one’s understanding. “He went to school on everybody,” Minor says. “I don’t think there was anybody Jeff knew that he didn’t walk away from with whatever lessons he could.

贝佐斯还非常敬重计算机领域的先驱科学家艾伦·凯（Alan Kay），时常引用他的观点，认为“好点子能抵80分智商数值

ALAN: (…) Lo que realmente somos es la longitud total de nosotros mismos, nuestro entero tiempo, y cuando llegamos al fin de esta vida, todos esos seres, todo nuestro tiempo serán nosotros… el verdadero tú, el verdadero yo (…). KAY: (…) Olvidar que el tiempo no está devorando nuestras vidas… destrozando, arruinándolo todo… para siempre… ALAN: No, todo está muy bien, Kay. Te buscaré ese libro. (Va hacia la puerta, pero se vuelve). Sabes, me parece que gran parte de nuestra preocupación nace de que consideramos al tiempo como el devorador de nuestras vidas. Por eso nos precipitamos los unos sobre los otros, y nos lastimamos mutuamente. KAY: Como una escena de pánico en un barco que se hunde. ALAN: Sí, exactamente así. KAY (sonriéndole): Pero tú no haces esas cosas… ¡Tú eres tan bueno! ALAN: Pienso que es más fácil no hacerlas, una vez que se ha adoptado un punto de vista más ámplio. KAY: ¿Como si fueramos seres… inmortales? ALAN (sonriendo): Sí, y lanzados a una magnífica aventura.

The most important thing I learned on productivity is this Alan Kay quote: Perspective is worth 80 IQ points. You could be the most productive person in the world, but it won’t make the slightest bit of difference if you’re pointing your talents in a direction that isn’t useful to other people. If you’re talented, your gift is precious and your time is limited. Learn how to direct your talents, it will be the most important thing you do.

as the computer scientist Alan Kay has put it, “The best way to predict the future is to invent it.

At the first session the group piled on an unfortunate wild man from that backwater, the University of Utah, named Alan Kay. Kay had stepped forth in a public session to pitch his vision of a computer you could hold in your hand. He had already coined a name for it: “Dynabook,” a notebook-shaped machine with a display screen and a keyboard you could use to create, edit, and store a very personal sort of literature, music, and art. “He was crazy,” Wessler recalled. “People greeted the whole idea with disbelief and gave him a very tough time. He painted this picture of walking around with a computer under your arm, which we all thought was completely ridiculous.

In school, this explicit teaching of facts and procedures is rampant in almost every subject area. In science, it’s called “the scientific method” and often includes steps such as: Observe something and/or do research. Construct a hypothesis. Make a prediction based on your hypothesis. Test your hypothesis by doing an experiment. Analyze the results of your experiment. Determine if your hypothesis was correct. The steps vary slightly between models. However, no matter the actual words on the checklist, or how many steps are included, we teach them to children as if they descended on stone tablets. Teachers devise songs or mnemonic devices to help students memorize the rigid steps. Then students memorize the vocabulary words that go along with the scientific method: hypothesis, fair test, variables, control groups, reliability, validity, etc. Finally, students fill out worksheets to match the vocabulary words with the correct definitions and put the steps in order. This is not science. Science is about wonder and risk and imagination, not checklists or vocabulary memorization. Alan Kay laments that much of what schools teach isn’t science at all, it’s science appreciation. (Kay, 2007)

Skinner’s teaching machine might look terribly out-of-date, but I’d argue that this is the history that still shapes so much of what we see today. Self-paced learning, gamification, an emphasis on real-time or near-real-time corrections. No doubt, ed-tech today draws quite heavily on Skinner’s ideas because Skinner (and his fellow education psychologist Edward Thorndike) has been so influential in how we view teaching and learning and how we view schooling. So much B. F. Skinner. So little Seymour Papert. So little Alan Kay. I'd argue too that this isn’t just about education technology. There’s so much Skinner and so little Kay in “mainstream” technology too. Think Zynga, for example.

we predict the future, the best way to predict the future is to invent it

Though it has become a naturalized part of music-making since the first one was built in 1710, the pianoforte (its name means “soft-loud”) was a technical marvel for its time, a machine that changed music in ways that are hard to imagine. Computer pioneer Alan Kay once observed that any technological advance is “technology only for people who are born before it was invented,” and in the case of the piano, this applies to no one alive today. Seymour Papert, the MIT researcher, concluded, “That’s why we don’t argue about whether the piano is corrupting music with technology.

Miss Kay In the midst of that low place, the darkest place I have ever been emotionally, with thoughts of sleep and rest filling my mind, through my sobs I heard the scurry of little feet headed toward the bathroom door. I could tell all three boys, in their house shoes, were coming to talk to me. Alan spoke first: “Mom, don’t cry. Don’t cry anymore. God will take care of us.” I was silent for a moment. Then I heard Jase ask, “Did she quit crying?” And I could hear Willie doing something he did often, making smacking noises while sucking on two of his fingers. In an instant, it was like a lightbulb came on for me. “What am I doing?” I asked myself. “I have three little boys. I can’t leave them with a drunk.” I spoke to my sons through the door. “I’m okay. I love y’all. I’ll be out in a minute.” I then got on my knees and prayed. “God, help me. Just help me. I don’t want to leave these kids. I don’t know what to do or where to find You. Just lead me to somebody who can help me.

Si miras al software hoy en día, a través de los lentes de la historia de la ingeniería, parece un tipo de ingeniería, pero del tipo de ingeniería que hacía la gente que no conocía el concepto del arco. Gran parte del software de hoy día es en cierta medida como una pirámide egipcia con millones de piedras apiladas una encima de otra, sin integridad estructural, construido por fuerza bruta y miles de esclavos”. –Alan Kay.

Computer pioneer Alan Kay likes to say that technology is anything that was invented after you were born.

So, technology is the set of things, as Alan Kay said, that don’t quite work yet [correction: Danny Hillis]. Once something works, it’s no longer technology. Society always wants new things. And if you want to be wealthy, you want to figure out which one of those things you can provide for society that it does not yet know how to get but it will want and providing it is natural to you, within your skill set, and within your capabilities.

Everything done at PARC, from the Alto to Bob Metcalf’s Ethernet architecture, was geared to making a decentralized network of personal computers function efficiently. This was new. The second core principle flowed from Alan Kay’s Dynabook. As Brown says, “The Dynabook and then the Alto were inspirations meant to empower the artistic individual.

Peter has a set of rules that guide his life. His 28 Peter’s Laws have been collected over decades. Here are some of my favorites: Law 2: When given a choice . . . take both. Law 3: Multiple projects lead to multiple successes. Law 6: When forced to compromise, ask for more. Law 7: If you can’t win, change the rules. Law 8: If you can’t change the rules, then ignore them. Law 11: “No” simply means begin again at one level higher. Law 13: When in doubt: THINK. Law 16: The faster you move, the slower time passes, the longer you live. Law 17: The best way to predict the future is to create it yourself. (adopted from Alan Kay) Law 19: You get what you incentivize. Law 22: The day before something is a breakthrough, it’s a crazy idea. Law 26: If you can’t measure it, you can’t improve it.

The best way tp predict the future is to invent it.

The best way to predict the future is to invent it

One of the office machines there was an elaborate electric typewriter that could do minimal text formatting through the application of a complicated sequence of keystrokes. No one ever utilized the beastly device’s capability except Merry, who was caught at it one day by Alan Kay. “You’re a programmer!” he exclaimed. “No kidding,” she said. Impressed by the natural skills of this secretary smuggled over from the physics lab, Kay gave her a few hours of rudimentary training. After that it was a relatively simple matter to get her assigned to his group.

But one man was way ahead of them all. That one had written a doctoral thesis at Utah in 1969 describing an idealized interactive computer called the FLEX machine. He had experimented with powerful displays and with computers networked in intricate configurations. On page after page of his dissertation he lamented the inability of the world’s existing hardware to realize his dream of an interactive personal computer. He set before science the challenge to build the machine he imagined, one with “enough power to outrace your senses of sight and hearing, enough capacity to store thousands of pages, poems, letters, recipes, records, drawings, animations, musical scores, and anything else you would like to remember and change.” To Taylor he was a soulmate and a profound thinker, capable of seeing a computing future far beyond anything even he could imagine. Among the computer scientists familiar with his ideas, half thought he was a crackpot and the other half a visionary. His name was Alan Kay.

There was this thread of ideas that led from Vannevar Bush through J. C. R. Licklider, Doug Engelbart, Ted Nelson, and Alan Kay

If you don't fail at least 90 percent of the time, you're not aiming high enough.

Alan Kay said, that don’t quite work yet [correction: Danny Hillis]. Once something works, it’s no longer technology. Society always wants new things. And if you want to be wealthy, you want to figure out which one of those things you can provide for society that it does not yet know how to get but it will want and providing it is natural to you, within your skill set, and within your capabilities.

Alan Kay, the inventor of the Smalltalk language, once remarked: "I'm not against types, but I don't know of any type systems that aren't a complete pain, so I still like dynamic typing.

The best way to predict the future is to invent it. — Alan Kay

C’è qualcosa che gli umani sanno fare meglio dei computer: porre domande. Se sono giuste, le domande aprono nuove prospettive, che a loro volta possono avviare nuove narrazioni: è forse di questo che abbiamo bisogno. Correggere le tendenze collettive, globali, è un’impresa titanica: se sono automatiche, come per esempio quelle imposte dalla logica dei cosiddetti mercati finanziari, il compito sembra impossibile. Eppure l’impossibile – almeno questo lo sappiamo – non è eterno. E tutti coloro che spostano i limiti del possibile hanno qualcosa in comune. Coltivano un approccio critico, una visione e una pratica della sperimentazione, all’insegna dell’idea suggerita dal tecnologo Alan Kay, secondo cui il miglior modo di prevedere il futuro è inventarlo.

«La mejor manera de predecir el futuro es inventándolo».1 ALAN KAY

John Markoff: Still, Steve was emblematic of the Valley, rising to represent how it touched the popular culture. He is the vector for Alan Kay’s insight. Kay was the person who understood that computing was a universal medium, that it wasn’t a calculation tool, and as a universal medium it transformed any medium that it touched. Before computing, there had been paper, there had been music, there had been video, and computing sort of relentlessly transformed each one of them, and Steve was the vector. He was the messenger who sort of implemented Alan’s vision. Steve was the one who shaped those products so that they were usable by mortals and so we could get beyond the original personal computers. And the modern world is different because of that.

When a really difficult thing is being worked on and you get synergy from the small team in just the right way, you can’t describe it. It’s like love. It is love,” says Alan Kay, a visionary computer scientist who worked at Xerox PARC, Apple, and Atari. “You’re trying to nurture this thing that is not alive into being alive.” 18

VR is not as new as it seems: It germinated inside Alan Kay’s research lab at Atari. The lab collapsed when Atari did, scattering Kay’s people across the Valley, but a young, dreadlocked, programming prodigy, Jaron Lanier, continued the research on his own dime. His original goal was to revive an old dream. Like Doug Engelbart and Alan Kay, Lanier wanted to create a computing environment that was immersive, flexible, and empowering. The difference was the interface. Engelbart invented the mouse. Alan Kay added the desktop metaphor. And in Lanier’s iteration, one donned goggles and gloves and stepped into virtual reality. Lanier actually coined the phrase. And the whole point of this new, all-enveloping interface was to be able to program the computer from the inside. There was just one problem: Once people got inside the computer, virtually no one wanted to code. There was a whole world in there, a cyberdelic Disneyland just waiting to be explored. Lanier thought he was building a next-generation programming language with the corresponding next-generation graphical user interface, but what people experienced was something a lot more fun. VR was The Well’s cyberspace made real. Taking advantage of the ensuing limelight, Lanier swiftly assumed a more Jobs-like role and marketed the heck out of his virtual reality machine, but in the end, the cost of an E ticket was just too high.

Alan Kay: Computing is terrible. People think—falsely—that there’s been something like Darwinian processes generating the present. So therefore what we have now must be better than anything that had been done before. And they don’t realize that Darwinian processes, as any biologist will tell you, have nothing to do with optimization. They have to do with fitness. If you have a stupid environment you are going to get a stupid fit.

Alan Kay: They just were so brain-dead and so unable to understand anything about any process that was not simple business. Alvy Ray Smith: Did they make a mistake? From a corporate point of view probably not. After having started two companies myself and having had all the Young Turks come to me and say, “Alvy, we should do this, this, this, and this,” it becomes quickly evident that you can’t do every bright idea that comes down the pike. You just can’t. You have to prune the tree. And your job as management is to prune the tree and stick to what you know. I still think they blew it, though. Bob Taylor: It’s pretty clear that Xerox fumbled the future.

Bruce Horn: I thought that computers would be hugely flexible and we could be able to do everything and it would be the most mind-blowing experience ever. And instead we froze all of our thinking. We froze all the software and made it kind of industrial and mass-marketed. Computing went in the wrong direction: Computing went to the direction of commercialism and cookie-cutter. Jaron Lanier: My whole field has created shit. And it’s like we’ve thrust all of humanity into this endless life of tedium, and it’s not how it was supposed to be. The way we’ve designed the tools requires that people comply totally with an infinite number of arbitrary actions. We really have turned humanity into lab rats that are trained to run mazes. I really think on just the most fundamental level we are approaching digital technology in the wrong way. Andy van Dam: Ask yourself, what have we got today? We’ve got Microsoft Word and we’ve got PowerPoint and we’ve got Illustrator and we’ve got Photoshop. There’s more functionality and, for my taste, an easier-to-understand user interface than what we had before. But they don’t work together. They don’t play nice together. And most of the time, what you’ve got is an import/export capability, based on bitmaps: the lowest common denominator—dead bits, in effect. What I’m still looking for is a reintegration of these various components so that we can go back to the future and have that broad vision at our fingertips. I don’t see how we are going to get there, frankly. Live bits—where everything interoperates—we’ve lost that. Bruce Horn: We’re waiting for the right thing to happen to have the same type of mind-blowing experience that we were able to show the Apple people at PARC. There’s some work being done, but it’s very tough. And, yeah, I feel somewhat responsible. On the other hand, if somebody like Alan Kay couldn’t make it happen, how can I make it happen?

In July, Stackhouse and Kaye had been at a honky-tonk bar when a guy wearing a cowboy hat pointed at first one and then the other and said, “A girl with your face, and with your tits, damn, that girl could take over the world. Hell, you could take me home tonight, you wanted to.” Stackhouse took off the man’s cowboy hat and dumped her beer on him and the bar cheered. She kept the hat.

Not that they ever thought of him that way at PARC. “Gary Starkweather had been thrown out of Webster,” Alan Kay remarked with manifest approval. “We considered him one of us.