4 ms·
I’d strongly recommend the book Dealers of Lightning. Now I should comment that Alan Kay was at Parc and its where he did amazing work that holds up to this day
by fuzzygroup 9y ago
I’d strongly recommend the book Dealers of Lightning. Now I should comment that Alan Kay was at Parc and its where he did amazing work that holds up to this day so pay the most attention to his answer of course. But I learned a ton about Parc’s history from Dealers of Lightning.
I’d also point out that Bob Taylor apparently had a hard limit of 50 researchers because he felt that was all he could manage. This meant that he, by this criteria, had to get the absolute best, smartest scientists / researchers he could find. If you look at the sheer number of absolutely brilliant people assembled at Parc during the same time period, it is astonishing: Alan Kay (smalltalk), Butler Lampson (alto, *), Bob Metcalf (ethernet), the founders of Adobe (postscript), Charles Simonyi (bravo which later became Microsoft Word), etc. Close to 100% of modern computing directly came from Parc.
- peterburkimsher 9y agoThe article itself is by Alan Kay, and lists Butler Lampson, as well as Bob Taylor and Chuck Thacker by name.
- techrich 9y agoI second this, if any youngsters out there want to learn some computer history. This is a great place to start.
- EdwardCoffin 9y agoThis might be relevant: in the AMA that he did less than a year ago [1], Alan Kay said [2]: > "Dealers of Lightning" is not the best book to read (try Mitchell Waldrop's "The Dream Machine"). That said, I have read Dealers of Lightning myself, and really liked it. I have not yet got around to The Dream Machine. [1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11939851 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11939851 [2] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11940756 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11940756