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He felt the computer was going to change the world, and it was going to become what he called "the bicycle for the mind." I'd heard Alan Kay repeat this many t

by andreyf 16y ago

He felt the computer was going to change the world, and it was going to become what he called "the bicycle for the mind." I'd heard Alan Kay repeat this many times. I don't know of much hard evidence (I'd really appreciate some, if you do), but I have a feeling that Alan Kay and the Smalltalk community was a great inspiration to Steve Jobs and Apple's way of thinking.

kqr2 16y ago
Interview with Steve Jobs where he talks about the computer as a bicycle for the mind: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ob_GX50Za6c http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ob_GX50Za6c To put it in context, he starts off by talking about the efficiency of animal locomotion. In the animal kingdom, the condor is one of the most efficient. It uses the least amount of energy to travel a kilometer. Human walking is rather inefficient in comparison. However, with a bicycle, a man can blow away a condor.
- andreyf 16y ago
  Right, and it was also mentioned in the article. Alan Kay's essay by the same title is here: http://web.archive.org/web/20080107173514/http://www.iam.unibe.ch/~denker/old/_A_bicycle_for_the_mind_.html http://web.archive.org/web/20080107173514/http://www.iam.uni... Some other similarities off the top of my head: Alan Kay also often speaks about "building systems", and both this article and Steve himself talked about Apple's advantage being "good system integration". Objective-C, inspired directly from one of Alan's brain-children, was at the core of the value of NeXT, which Steve started, and is still at the core of all of Apple's developer platforms. I don't know if the two have ever met, but I think they certainly hang out hang out with similar-minded folk... ;)
bhiggins 16y ago
Alan Kay and Steve Jobs go way back... http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Xerox_Alto http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Xerox_Alto http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Objective-C http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Objective-C http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dynabook http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dynabook That said, Smalltalk is overrated.
- greendestiny 16y ago
  I think its probably more fair to say that after many years of being massively underrated and overlooked the lip service which computer science pays to Smalltalk is way higher than the actual amount of work put into the ecosystem around the language.
  - bhiggins 16y ago
    Smalltalk is like Libertarianism. It allows for those who find reality too difficult or hard to understand an escape to an ideology that is simple, elegant, and wrong.
- hboon 16y ago
  Why is it overrated? Edited: grammer.

by andreyf 16y ago

kqr2 16y ago

Interview with Steve Jobs where he talks about the computer as a bicycle for the mind: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ob_GX50Za6c http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ob_GX50Za6c To put it in context, he starts off by talking about the efficiency of animal locomotion. In the animal kingdom, the condor is one of the most efficient. It uses the least amount of energy to travel a kilometer. Human walking is rather inefficient in comparison. However, with a bicycle, a man can blow away a condor.

andreyf 16y ago
Right, and it was also mentioned in the article. Alan Kay's essay by the same title is here: http://web.archive.org/web/20080107173514/http://www.iam.unibe.ch/~denker/old/_A_bicycle_for_the_mind_.html http://web.archive.org/web/20080107173514/http://www.iam.uni... Some other similarities off the top of my head: Alan Kay also often speaks about "building systems", and both this article and Steve himself talked about Apple's advantage being "good system integration". Objective-C, inspired directly from one of Alan's brain-children, was at the core of the value of NeXT, which Steve started, and is still at the core of all of Apple's developer platforms. I don't know if the two have ever met, but I think they certainly hang out hang out with similar-minded folk... ;)

bhiggins 16y ago

Alan Kay and Steve Jobs go way back... http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Xerox_Alto http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Xerox_Alto http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Objective-C http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Objective-C http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dynabook http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dynabook That said, Smalltalk is overrated.

greendestiny 16y ago
I think its probably more fair to say that after many years of being massively underrated and overlooked the lip service which computer science pays to Smalltalk is way higher than the actual amount of work put into the ecosystem around the language.
- bhiggins 16y ago
  Smalltalk is like Libertarianism. It allows for those who find reality too difficult or hard to understand an escape to an ideology that is simple, elegant, and wrong.
hboon 16y ago
Why is it overrated? Edited: grammer.