Television should be the last mass communication medium to be naively designed and put into the world without a surgeon-general’s warning.
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.
More Alan Kay Quotes
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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.
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Having an intelligent secretary does not get rid of the need to read, write, and draw, etc.
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Quite a few people have to believe something is normal before it becomes normal – a sort of ‘voting’ situation.
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Possibly the only real object-oriented system in working order. (About Internet)
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The greatest single programming language ever designed
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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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I’ve heard complaints from even mighty Stanford University with its illustrious faculty that basically the undergraduate computer science program is little more than Java certification.
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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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Lisp isn’t a language, it’s a building material.
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The 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.
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The tree of research must be fed from time to time with the blood of bean-counters, for it is its natural manure.
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If you’re utopian, you’re never satisfied.
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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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A computer scientist is a machine for converting coffee into urine.
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Artificial intelligence is what we don’t know how to do yet
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There’s a real sense in which MS and Apple never understood networking or operating systems (or what objects really are).
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I realized that my usual approach is usually critical. That is, a lot of the things that I do, that most people do, are because they hate something somebody else has done, or they hate that something hasn’t been done.
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As far as Apple goes, it was a different company every few years from the time I joined in 1984.
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Sun Microsystems had the right people to make Java into a first-class language.
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As in all the arts, a romance with the material must be well under way.
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Any company large enough to have a research lab is too large to listen to it.
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The Web, in comparison, is a joke. The Web was done by amateurs.
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It’s easier to invent the future than to predict it.
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The future is not laid out on a track. It is something that we can decide.
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Computer literacy is a contact with the activity of computing deep enough to make the computational equivalent of reading and writing fluent and enjoyable.
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Every technology really needs to be shipped with a special manual – not how to use it but why, when, and for what.
ALAN KAY