If you haven't heard one of Alan Kay's many explanations of Sutherland's seminal Sketchpad work ("a Newton-like leap"), here's a wonderful one: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TY-hBgYLJqc#t=46m30s. Note the reference to Wes Clark, the pioneering system designer who died recently (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11183970). Clark liked Sutherland and gave him computer time in the middle of the night, which is how the Newton-like leap came to be.
There's way too much Kay content online nowadays. Thanks for the tip. It's cool to see him rant about the forgotten wonders on stage, it's a different thing to see him look around like a kid when describing sketchpad 'face to face'.
I got to meet him last week and couldn't resist gushing about how much I've learned from him. He seemed embarrassed. I couldn't help it—there's no one who's influenced me more in computing. He's agreed to do an AMA on HN, so hopefully we can set that up soon.
If you get beyond its terrible sound quality, that YouTube video has many stretches of Alan riffing that are pure gold. He embodies the history of our field and the values of the classic ARPA community culture. Much of that precious stuff is encoded in oral culture that we don't have a good way of continuing. I wish we could find a way for HN to facilitate that. It already does, to a small extent. But we need more than just to capture it as history, we need to carry it on, and I don't see that happening.
If you haven't heard one of Alan Kay's many explanations of Sutherland's seminal Sketchpad work ("a Newton-like leap"), here's a wonderful one: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TY-hBgYLJqc#t=46m30s. Note the reference to Wes Clark, the pioneering system designer who died recently (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11183970). Clark liked Sutherland and gave him computer time in the middle of the night, which is how the Newton-like leap came to be.