The 73+ Alan Kay Quotes

The Idea That Hardware On Networks Should Just Be Caches For Movable Process Descriptions And The Processes Themselves Goes Back Quite A Ways. There's A Real Sense In Which Ms And Apple Never Understood Networking Or Operating Systems (or What Objects Really Are), And 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.

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. There Will Be Always Unresolved Ambiguity Here.

It's All About Long-term, Sustaining Relationships.

To Get The Medium's Magic To Work For One's Aims Rather Than Against Them Is To Attain Literacy.

Television Should Be The Last Mass Communication Medium To Be Naively Designed And Put Into The World Without A Surgeon-general's Warning.

[computing] Is Just A Fabulous Place For That, Because It's A Place Where You Don't Have To Be A Ph.d. Or Anything Else. It's A Place Where You Can Still Be An Artisan. People Are Willing To Pay You If You're Any Good At All, And You Have Plenty Of Time For Screwing Around.

Every Technology Really Needs To Be Shipped With A Special Manual - Not How To Use It But Why, When, And For What.

Computer Literacy Is A Contact With The Activity Of Computing Deep Enough To Make The Computational Equivalent Of Reading And Writing Fluent And Enjoyable. As In All The Arts, A Romance With The Material Must Be Well Under Way. If We Value The Lifelong Learning Of Arts And Letters As A Springboard For Personal And Societal Growth, Should Any Less Effort Be Spent To Make Computing A Part Of Our Lives?

Possibly The Only Real Object-oriented System In Working Order. (about Internet)

When I First Prepared This Particular Talk... 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. And I Realized That Informed Criticism Has Completely Been Done In By The Web. Because The Web Has Produced So Much Uninformed Criticism. It's Kind Of A Gresham's Law-bad Money Drives The Good Money Out Of Circulation. Bad Criticism Drives Good Criticism Out Of Circulation. You Just Can't Criticize Anything.

Having An Intelligent Secretary Does Not Get Rid Of The Need To Read, Write, And Draw, Etc. In A Well Functioning World, Tools And Agents Are Complementary.

Perl Is Another Example Of Filling A Tiny, Short-term Need, And Then Being A Real Problem In The Longer Term.