Alan Kay Quotes, Years Quotes, Apples Quotes

As far as Apple goes, it was a different company every few years from the time I joined in 1984.

6 years ago

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Tags : Alan Kay Quotes , Years Quotes , Apples Quotes

The computer is simply an instrument whose music is ideas.

6 years ago

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A computer scientist is a machine for converting coffee into urine.

6 years ago

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Most software today is very much like an Egyptian pyramid with millions of bricks piled on top of each other, with no structural integrity, but just done by brute force and thousands of slaves.

6 years ago

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Tags : Alan Kay Quotes , Funny Inspirational Quotes , Integrity Quotes

School is basically about one point of view - the one the teacher has or the textbooks have. They don't like the idea of having different points of view.

6 years ago

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Scratch the surface in a typical boardroom and we're all just cavemen with briefcases, hungry for a wise person to tell us stories.

6 years ago

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If the pros at Sun had had a chance to fix Java, the world would be a much more pleasant place. This is not secret knowledge. It's just secret to this pop culture.

6 years ago

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Tags : Alan Kay Quotes , Secret Quotes , World Quotes

I made up the term "object-oriented," and I can tell you I did not have C++ in mind.

6 years ago

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Tags : Alan Kay Quotes , Mind Quotes , Programming Quotes

Computer literacy is a contact with the activity of computing deep enough to make the computational equivalent of reading and writing fluent and enjoyable. As in all the arts, a romance with the material must be well under way. If we value the lifelong learning of arts and letters as a springboard for personal and societal growth, should any less effort be spent to make computing a part of our lives?

6 years ago

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Tags : Alan Kay Quotes , Art Quotes , Reading Quotes

Understanding- -like civilization, happiness, music, science and a host of other great endeavors--is not a state of being, but a manner of traveling. This great road has no final destination. The journey itself is the reward.

6 years ago

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Tags : Alan Kay Quotes , Journey Quotes , Civilization Quotes

When the Mac first came out, Newsweek asked me what I [thought] of it. I said: Well, it's the first personal computer worth criticizing. So at the end of the presentation, Steve came up to me and said: Is the iPhone worth criticizing? And I said: Make the screen five inches by eight inches, and you'll rule the world.

6 years ago

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Tags : Alan Kay Quotes , Iphone Quotes , Eight Quotes

The idea that hardware on networks should just be caches for movable process descriptions and the processes themselves goes back quite a ways. There's a real sense in which MS and Apple never understood networking or operating systems (or what objects really are), and when they decided to beef up their OSs, they went to (different) very old bad mainframe models of OS design to try to adapt to personal computers.

6 years ago

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Tags : Alan Kay Quotes , Real Quotes , Ideas Quotes

I had the fortune or misfortune to learn how to read fluently starting at the age of three. So I had read maybe 150 books by the time I hit 1st grade. And I already knew that the teachers were lying to me.

6 years ago

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Change is easy, except for the changed part.

6 years ago

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Basic would never have surfaced because there was always a language better than Basic for that purpose. That language was Joss, which predated Basic and was beautiful. But Basic happened to be on a GE timesharing system that was done by Dartmouth, and when GE decided to franchise that, it started spreading Basic around just because it was there, not because it had any intrinsic merits whatsoever.

6 years ago

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Tags : Alan Kay Quotes , Beautiful Quotes , Merit Quotes

The Internet was done so well that most people think of it as a natural resource like the Pacific Ocean, rather than something that was man-made. When was the last time a technology with a scale like that was so error-free? The Web, in comparison, is a joke. The Web was done by amateurs.

6 years ago

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Tags : Alan Kay Quotes , Ocean Quotes , Technology Quotes

Every technology really needs to be shipped with a special manual - not how to use it but why, when, and for what.

6 years ago

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Sun Microsystems had the right people to make Java into a first-class language, and I believe it was the Sun marketing people who rushed the thing out before it should have gotten out.

6 years ago

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Tags : Alan Kay Quotes , Believe Quotes , Should Have Quotes

Any company large enough to have a research lab is too large to listen to it.

6 years ago

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Quite a few people have to believe something is normal before it becomes normal - a sort of 'voting' situation. But once the threshold is reached, then everyone demands to do whatever it is.

6 years ago

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Tags : Alan Kay Quotes , Believe Quotes , People Quotes