I think the trick with knowledge is to “acquire it, and forget all except the perfume” – because it is noisy and sometimes drowns out one’s own “brain voices”.
ALAN KAYWhen was the last time a technology with a scale like that was so error-free?
More Alan Kay Quotes
-
-
Television should be the last mass communication medium to be naively designed and put into the world without a surgeon-general’s warning.
ALAN KAY -
But once the threshold is reached, then everyone demands to do whatever it is.
ALAN KAY -
I fear – as far as I can tell – that most undergraduate degrees in computer science these days are basically Java vocational training.
ALAN KAY -
Any medium powerful enough to extend man’s reach is powerful enough to topple his world.
ALAN KAY -
And when they decided to beef up their OSs, they went to (different) very old bad mainframe models of OS design to try to adapt to personal computers.
ALAN KAY -
Simple things should be simple and complex things should be possible.
ALAN KAY -
We cannot predict the future, but we can invent it.
ALAN KAY -
The best way to predict the future is to invent it.
ALAN KAY -
Quite a few people have to believe something is normal before it becomes normal – a sort of ‘voting’ situation.
ALAN KAY -
The hard nerds are the ones who used to have the slide rules at their belt; now they have calculators.
ALAN KAY -
The computer is simply an instrument whose music is ideas.
ALAN KAY -
Most creativity is a transition from one context into another where things are more surprising.
ALAN KAY -
Art also has this element. Our job is to remind us that there are more contexts than the one that we’re in – the one that we think is reality.
ALAN KAY -
The Web, in comparison, is a joke. The Web was done by amateurs.
ALAN KAY -
I knew in the first grade that they were lying to me because I had already been exposed to other points of view.
ALAN KAY






