Alan Kay Media Center

1960s

Kay, Alan C.: FLEX: an extensible simulation language which can be directly executed by computer. Computer Science Note, September 67, University of Utah, Salt Lake City

FLEX – A flexible extendable language. MSc., Jun-1968, excerpt | complete scan

The Reactive Engine. PhD., 1969: University of Utah, excerpt | full | complete scan

1970s – The Xerox PARC Years

IJCAI'71 Proceedings of the 2nd international joint conference on Artificial intelligence. ACM-DL

AFIPS '71 (Fall) Proceedings of the November 16-18, 1971, fall joint computer conference. ACM-DL

A Personal Computer for Children of All Ages. In Proceedings of the ACM National Conference, Boston Aug. 1972. Kay72a^{11 pages, 900 KB} (transcript)

Alan Kay on the origin of the DynaBook /Quora 2019 | BTW all of Alan Kay’s thoughts on Quora

A Dynamic Medium For Creative Thought, National Council of Teachers of English Conference (NCTE) Conference “20 things to do with a Dynabook”
This was pretty much what I wanted the group to accomplish (except for music, etc.) [Kay 1996, p. 576]

Alan Kay, 32, child prodigy (National Quiz kid at 10), forme musician and artist, worked with Ivan Sutherland and Dave Evans at Utah, presently a researcher at Xerox. /via

1975 – 1980

Personal Computing. In: Meeting on 20 Years of Computing Science. Instituto di Elaborazione della Informazione, Pisa, Italy, 1975. Kay75 ^{30 pages, 2.5 MB}

Alan Kay / Adele Goldberg (eds): Dynamic Personal Media. Xerox Palo Alto Research Center, 1975

Republished by Viewpoints Research Institute: PDF

1981-1984 – The Atari Years

1984-1997 – The Apple Years

… architecture dominates material. To understand clay is not to understand the pot. What a pot is all about can be appreciated better by understanding the creators and users of the pot and their need both to inform the material with meaning and to extract meaning from the form.

1985

1986

cf. updated redux at keynote at Fundación Argentina de Smalltalk2009

1987

1988

cf. Knowledge Navigator Videos by Apple Computer

1989

ICSE '89: Proceedings of the 11th international conference on Software engineeringMay 1989, pp 256

1990

Apple: Future Shock

1991

«The model building capabilities of the computer should enable mindlike processes to be built and should allow designers to create flexible "agents". These agents will take on their owner's goals, confer about strategies (asking questions of users as well as answering their queries) and, by reasoning, fabricate goals of their own.»

1992

1993

1994

1995

1997-2001 – The Disney Years

1998

1999

2000

real media stream at pp_engelbart-kay.ram

2001 :: Viewpoint Research Institute 2001-2018

In essence, this is a talk about what is a real subject that children can learn, and how do we teach it to children. It is a talk about curriculum, and how to develop curriculum that is meaningful and real to children and to our current and future world. /via

2002

2003

2004

LOST VIDEO

2005

• Phil Windley‘s Technometria
• gracewanderer: Alan Kay lecture

• Phil Windley‘s Technometria

[Squeakland 13-Aug-2007] the non universals

We don’t see things as they are – but as we are.

2007

…in the last few years I’ve been asking computer scientists and programmers whether they’ve ever typed E-N-G-E-L-B-A-R-T into Google-and none of them have. I don’t think you could find a physicist who has not gone back and tried to find out what Newton actually did.

• Raimondo Fanale's blog

2008

2009

2010

Americans generally think [computer in school] is about jobs, but it’s main purpose is to create a voting public who are sophisticated enough to sustain a democratic republic, where the “ultimate powers of the society” are placed in their hands.

2011

2012

2013

transcript part 1 | transcript part 2

2014

• Bonnie MacBird creating the script for TRON on a Xerox Alto
• original Xerox PARC Smalltalk master tape backup survived – now emulated on JavaScript

bitsavers 23-Jan-2018: The preservation of the LRG Smalltalk packs in this video is inaccurate. They weren't in a giant pile of eWaste, they were in boxes at Weird Stuff Warehouse. I was the person who saved them. Here is an example of one of them now in the CHM collection.

2015

• idaes as matter vs. ideas as radiation
• MML: Children are the message we send into the future.
  ACK: No, children are the future that we send into the future.

2016

2017

2018

/via Alan Kay and Quora | BTW all of Alan Kay’s thoughts on Quora

2019

• Alan Kay: The Power Of The Context
• Alan Kay: How?

2020

/cf. Alan Kay 2019: How?

Refs:

• Mobilizing for a zero carbon America by Saul Griffith and Sam Calisch
• Reinventing Fire. Bold Business Solutions for the New Energy Era by Amory B. Lovins
• How? by Alan Kay 2019

Polluting – Poor Pondering – Problem Finding – Probing (Q&A)

2021

2022

2023

At the same event:

• Ivan Sutherland and Alvy Ray Smith

2024

2025

• Alan Kay: Re-Minding and Re-Asking About Humans and Thought
• Peter Gabriel introduces…
• Gary Marcus: The Grand AGI Delusion
• Nigel Shadbolt: Varieties of Intelligence. Evolving the Turing Test

2026