I remember Alan Kay writing that at Xerox Park they had the entire Whole Earth Catalog collection. I'm not sure why, but maybe to get the creativity juices flow

I remember Alan Kay writing that at Xerox Park they had the entire Whole Earth Catalog collection. I'm not sure why, but maybe to get the creativity juices flowing? He probably already stated in an interview somewhere. Edit: https://press.uchicago.edu/Misc/Chicago/817415_chap4.html https://press.uchicago.edu/Misc/Chicago/817415_chap4.html Here is a little text snippet: But Kay had also found the Whole Earth Catalog. He first saw a copy in 1969, in Utah. "I remember thinking, 'Oh yeah, that's the right idea,'" he explained in 2004. "The same way it should be easier to do your own composting, you should have the ability to deal with complicated ideas by making models of them on the computer." For Kay, and for others at Xerox PARC, the Catalog embodied a do-it-yourself attitude, a vision of technology as a source of individual and collective transformation, and a media format—all of which could be applied to the computers on which they were working. As Kay explained, he had already begun to think of the computer as a "language machine where content was the description of things." When he saw the Catalog, it offered him a vision of how an information system might organize that content. He and others at PARC saw the Catalog as an information tool and, hence, as an analogue to the computer; at the same time, they saw it as a hyperlinked information system. In that sense, remembered Kay, "we thought of the Whole Earth Catalog as a print version of what the Internet was going to be." Kay and his colleagues in the Systems Science Laboratory paid particular attention to the Catalog's design. In the Last Whole Earth Catalog of 1971