But Basic happened to be on a GE timesharing system that was done by Dartmouth, and when GE decided to franchise that, it started spreading Basic around just because it was there, not because it had any intrinsic merits whatsoever.
ALAN KAYI had the fortune or misfortune to learn how to read fluently starting at the age of three.
More Alan Kay Quotes
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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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And to the extent that we do not violate any known laws of the universe, we can probably make it work the way that we want to.
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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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The real romance is out ahead and yet to come. The computer revolution hasn’t started yet.
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Perspective is worth 80 IQ points.
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Perl is another example of filling a tiny, short-term need, and then being a real problem in the longer term.
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Lisp isn’t a language, it’s a building material.
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Scratch the surface in a typical boardroom and we’re all just cavemen with briefcases, hungry for a wise person to tell us stories.
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As in all the arts, a romance with the material must be well under way.
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Knowledge is silver. Outlook is gold. IQ is a lead weight.
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We cannot predict the future, but we can invent it.
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This tends to result in very dumbed-down products that are easy to get started on, but are generally worthless and/or debilitating.
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The idea that hardware on networks should just be caches for movable process descriptions and the processes themselves goes back quite a ways.
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In a well functioning world, tools and agents are complementary.
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But once the threshold is reached, then everyone demands to do whatever it is.
ALAN KAY