By the time I got to school, I had already read a couple hundred books.
ALAN KAYBy the time I got to school, I had already read a couple hundred books.
ALAN KAYEvery technology really needs to be shipped with a special manual – not how to use it but why, when, and for what.
ALAN KAYAnd 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 KAYComputer literacy is a contact with the activity of computing deep enough to make the computational equivalent of reading and writing fluent and enjoyable.
ALAN KAYThe result is – document destruction – we’re really not going to be able to prove beyond a truth the negatives and some of the positive conclusions that we’re going to come to.
ALAN KAYThey don’t like the idea of having different points of view, so it was a battle.
ALAN KAYThis tends to result in very dumbed-down products that are easy to get started on, but are generally worthless and/or debilitating.
ALAN KAYHaving an intelligent secretary does not get rid of the need to read, write, and draw, etc.
ALAN KAYThe flip side of the coin was that even good programmers and language designers tended to do terrible extensions when they were in the heat of programming, because design is something that is best done slowly and carefully.
ALAN KAYThe 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.
ALAN KAYPeople who are really serious about software should make their own hardware.
ALAN KAYArt 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 KAYBut once the threshold is reached, then everyone demands to do whatever it is.
ALAN KAYTelevision should be the last mass communication medium to be naively designed and put into the world without a surgeon-general’s warning.
ALAN KAYThe hard nerds are the ones who used to have the slide rules at their belt; now they have calculators.
ALAN KAYThe computer is simply an instrument whose music is ideas.
ALAN KAY