So at the end of the presentation, Steve came up to me and said: Is the iPhone worth criticizing? And I said: Make the screen five inches by eight inches, and you’ll rule the world.
ALAN KAYPeople are willing to pay you if you’re any good at all, and you have plenty of time for screwing around.
More Alan Kay Quotes
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Technology is anything that wasn’t around when you were born.
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When the Mac first came out, Newsweek asked me what I [thought] of it. I said: Well, it’s the first personal computer worth criticizing.
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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.
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And I realized that informed criticism has completely been done in by the web.
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Most software today is very much like an Egyptian pyramid with millions of bricks piled on top of each other, with no structural integrity, but just done by brute force and thousands of slaves.
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Knowledge is silver. Outlook is gold. IQ is a lead weight.
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In computers, every ‘new explosion’ was set off by a software product that allowed users to program differently.
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I made up the term “object-oriented,” and I can tell you I did not have C++ in mind.
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The most disastrous thing that you can ever learn is your first programming language.
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In our society we have hard nerds and soft nerds.
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Television should be the last mass communication medium to be naively designed and put into the world without a surgeon-general’s warning.
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There is the desire of a consumer society to have no learning curves.
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Technology is anything invented after you were born, everything else is just stuff.
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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”.
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As in all the arts, a romance with the material must be well under way.
ALAN KAY