
Alan Kay Interview (1990) [video] - espeed
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=275FQ9koAw8
======
eschutte2
I 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.

------
zengid
I 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.

------
lloydde
There is a full transcript at the video's home:
[http://openvault.wgbh.org/catalog/V_D9DC82D997454711A71B586E...](http://openvault.wgbh.org/catalog/V_D9DC82D997454711A71B586E17D23119)

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
Or 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 ;-)

