Technology is anything invented after you were born, everything else is just stuff.
ALAN KAYTo get the medium’s magic to work for one’s aims rather than against them is to attain literacy.
More Alan Kay Quotes
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As in all the arts, a romance with the material must be well under way.
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Humans are communications junkies. We just can’t get enough.
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Bad criticism drives good criticism out of circulation. You just can’t criticize anything.
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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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The computer is simply an instrument whose music is ideas.
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Any company large enough to have a research lab is too large to listen to it.
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Bad User on Device is a medium that can dynamically simulate the details of any other medium, including media that cannot exist physically.
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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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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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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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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.
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Java is the most distressing thing to hit computing since MS-DOS.
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In a well functioning world, tools and agents are complementary.
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When was the last time a technology with a scale like that was so error-free?
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I fear – as far as I can tell – that most undergraduate degrees in computer science these days are basically Java vocational training.
ALAN KAY