alankay

11 ms·

1.
by alankay 5y ago
Thank you for this comment, I found it to be tremendously useful in helping me understand some of the attitudes of the present day. I did understand the situation I was in, and I do see that the world has changed. Arguments against passiona
2.
by alankay 7y ago
Yes, the separate timelines of "Dealers" quite missed the cross fertilization and synergies of Parc (which were its main unusual features), so to me, this is a real drawback to this book. On the other hand, "systems" don
3.
by alankay 7y ago
Parc was an "extension" or "outgrowth" of the ARPA (before the "D") sponsored computer research in the 60s that was catalyzed by Congress overreacting to Viet Nam protests and changing ARPA's charter for t
4.
by alankay 7y ago
Thanks!
5.
by alankay 7y ago
A very nice remembrance by John Markoff in the NYTimes: https://mail.yahoo.com/d/folders/1/messages/AOkUKy0vu8HQXk9u...
6.
by alankay 7y ago
The best book about the ARPA/Parc research community (Parc sprouted from ARPA) is "The Dream Machine" by Mitchell Waldrop: it is both the most complete and most accurate. "Dealers of Lightning" is at the next level
7.
by alankay 7y ago
Most of the people who were at Parc who are still alive are still doing research. Pretty much only one wanted to get rich (and did). Several were more or less forced into becoming rich. Money has its own dynamics and none of these folks wou
8.
by alankay 7y ago
Please take the trouble to look more closely at what they did, and when.
9.
by alankay 7y ago
No, that is Bert.
10.
by alankay 7y ago
I knew Larry Tesler as a colleague, friend, member of my research group, manager, etc. for more than 50 years, almost as long as I knew Bert Sutherland. There is an excellent obit for Larry at: https://gizmodo.com/larry-tess
11.
by alankay 7y ago
I knew Bert for well over 50 years, and the first word that comes to mind to describe him is "lovable", and the second is "foundational". It is too early for those of us who loved him to recount "Bert stories"
12.
by alankay 7y ago
Gary was a wonderful person, an engineer's engineer, with an inquisitive scientific bent and warm sense of humor about and love of invention. His move from Rochester to Xerox Parc in its earliest days was his "last chance" ac
13.
by alankay 7y ago
In the HOPL paper is some discussion of the first design for Smalltalk, that I was working on when "the bet" happened and brought Smalltalk-72 to life as the answer to "the bet" (it used a combination of Lisp and Meta II
14.
by alankay 7y ago
This is a quite inaccurate comment. The catalysts (in 1966) for the ideas I had included Sketchpad (especially), Simula I (a few days later), the ARPAnet (under discussion), operating systems inter-process communications (especially Project
15.
by alankay 7y ago
From the very proper English lady across the table from me at a supper at Douglas Adams' house: "You Americans have the best high school education in the world -- what a pity you have to go to college to get it!"
16.
by alankay 7y ago
Actually, I said: "I invented the term "object-oriented", and I didn't have C++ in mind". In other comments here I explain why "object-oriented" was a too quick and bad choice for what I thought I was doin
17.
by alankay 7y ago
Merrill Engineering Building! I'm glad it is still around. Those long hallways were used as a "display" to unroll the many pages of Simula machine code listings down one corridor so that three grad students -- including me --
18.
by alankay 7y ago
It's out of the context of this thread, but we were quite sure that "simulation-style" systems design would be a much more powerful and comprehensive way to create most things on a computer, and most especially for personal
19.
by alankay 7y ago
An interesting and unfortunately true commentary on the lack of civilized behavior using technology that actually required a fair amount of effort -- and civilized behavior -- to invent in the first place.
20.
by alankay 7y ago
I'm the "computing Alan Kay" from the ARPA/Parc research community (there's a clarinettist, a judge, a wrestler, etc.) I did create a new account for these replies (I used my old ARPA login name).
21.
by alankay 7y ago
Again, please do your homework.
22.
by alankay 7y ago
That isn't what happened at all (see the rebuttal by revvx). Joe was a great guy and also a great systems thinker. And he was the last person to worry about "bandwagons" (quite the opposite!)
23.
by alankay 7y ago
I didn't coin the term "object" -- and I shouldn't have used it in 1966 when I did coin the term "object-oriented programming" flippantly in response to the question "what are you working on?". This i
24.
by alankay 7y ago
This is way off. Please try to do more homework.
25.
by alankay 7y ago
P.S. Joe and I have had the most wonderful conversations, right up to a few months ago. We'll miss him terribly and remember him vividly!
26.
by alankay 7y ago
Rumors of my passing have been greatly exaggerated!
27.
by alankay 7y ago
What a wonderful spirit he was, never to be forgotten. We had lots of great interactions over the years, and he greatly enriched computing with his ideas and actions.
28.
by alankay 7y ago
What a wonderful spirit he was, never to be forgotten
29.
by alankay 8y ago
For "discovered" vs "invented" I think you have to posit your definition of "exist". This puzzled Russell, Whitehead, Wittgenstein, etc. The Peano axioms describe constraints for instances within a set. Is some
30.
by alankay 8y ago
The "someone" for Smalltalk was Dan Ingalls. I came up with the Smalltalk half-pager because John McCarthy had shown how to do it -- and because message-passing OOP can be a not too crazy perspective on Lisp (especially a variant

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