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Alan Kay Interview (1990) [video]
- lloydde 10y agoThere is a full transcript at the video's home: http://openvault.wgbh.org/catalog/V_D9DC82D997454711A71B586E17D23119 http://openvault.wgbh.org/catalog/V_D9DC82D997454711A71B586E... My favorite: Interviewer: DID [institutional model / one or two runs a day] PUT MANY PEOPLE OFF COMPUTING? Kay: I don't think so. I think you, you know the happiness is the how much expectations you know, the reality exceeds expectations.
- mikekchar 10y agoOr about 5 minutes in: 'So for instance, John McCarthy, who is a professor at MIT both wrote memos suggesting we should time-share the computer, and he also thought more into the future that we'd be all networked together, and there would be these huge information utilities it would be like our power and lighting utilities that would give us the entire wealth of the knowledge of man, and he suggested on that what we'd have to have is something like an intelligent agent. An entity not maybe as smart as us, but an expert in finding things, and we would have to give it advice. He called it the "advice-taker."' Of course the interviewer brought the interview back on track with the next question ;-)
- zengid 10y agoI can't remember where it is (somewhere in the middle), but I like the part where Alan Kay describes (paraphrasing) programming languages as 'Idealized machines', and that if we layer ideal machines on top of each other it increases the pleasure of programming at the cost of performance.
- eschutte2 10y agoI love this bit (about 48 minutes in, talking about Aldus Manutius): KAY: this notion that a computer can be lost is not one that we like yet. we protect our computers. we bolt them to the desk, and so forth. INT: because they're still quite valuable. KAY: still quite... expensive. they'll be really valuable when we can lose them.