Computer literacy is a contact with the activity of computing deep enough to make the computational equivalent of reading and writing fluent and enjoyable.
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 KAYI fear – as far as I can tell – that most undergraduate degrees in computer science these days are basically Java vocational training.
ALAN KAYThe idea that hardware on networks should just be caches for movable process descriptions and the processes themselves goes back quite a ways.
ALAN KAYPeople who are really serious about software should make their own hardware.
ALAN KAYIt 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 KAYThe protean nature of the computer is such that it can act like a machine or like a language to be shaped and exploited.
ALAN KAYEvery technology really needs to be shipped with a special manual – not how to use it but why, when, and for what.
ALAN KAYAny medium powerful enough to extend man’s reach is powerful enough to topple his world.
ALAN KAYSome people worry that artificial intelligence will make us feel inferior, but then, anybody in his right mind should have an inferiority complex every time he looks at a flower.
ALAN KAYScratch the surface in a typical boardroom and we’re all just cavemen with briefcases, hungry for a wise person to tell us stories.
ALAN KAYIf you’re not failing 90% of the time, then you’re probably not working on sufficiently challenging problems.
ALAN KAYAnd I realized that informed criticism has completely been done in by the web.
ALAN KAYThe tree of research must be fed from time to time with the blood of bean-counters, for it is its natural manure.
ALAN KAYA new friend is new wine, when it grows old, you will enjoy drinking it.
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 KAYAs in all the arts, a romance with the material must be well under way.
ALAN KAY