It is not a tool, although it can act like many tools. It is the first metamedium, and as such it has degrees of freedom for representation and expression never before encountered and as yet barely investigated.
ALAN KAYComputer literacy is a contact with the activity of computing deep enough to make the computational equivalent of reading and writing fluent and enjoyable.
More Alan Kay Quotes
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We cannot predict the future, but we can invent it.
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Perspective is worth 80 IQ points.
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The Web, in comparison, is a joke. The Web was done by amateurs.
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If the pros at Sun had had a chance to fix Java, the world would be a much more pleasant place.
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But Basic happened to be on a GE timesharing system that was done by Dartmouth, and when GE decided to franchise that, it started spreading Basic around just because it was there, not because it had any intrinsic merits whatsoever.
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The hard nerds are the ones who used to have the slide rules at their belt; now they have calculators.
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School is basically about one point of view – the one the teacher has or the textbooks have.
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The real romance is out ahead and yet to come. The computer revolution hasn’t started yet.
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So I had read maybe 150 books by the time I hit 1st grade. And I already knew that the teachers were lying to me.
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If you’re not failing 90% of the time, then you’re probably not working on sufficiently challenging problems.
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An important technology first creates a problem and then solves it.
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Don’t worry about what anybody else is going to do. The best way to predict the future is to invent it.
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I had the fortune or misfortune to learn how to read fluently starting at the age of three.
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Because the web has produced so much uninformed criticism. It’s kind of a Gresham’s Law-bad money drives the good money out of circulation.
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To get the medium’s magic to work for one’s aims rather than against them is to attain literacy.
ALAN KAY






