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People who are really serious about software should make their own hardware.

Alan Kay

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Alan Kay
Age: 84
Born: 1940
Born: May 17
Computer Scientist
Jazz Guitarist
Jazz Musician
Programmer
University Teacher
Springfield
Massachusetts
Alan Curtis Kay
Alan C. Kay
Hardware
Seriousness
Software
Serious
Technology
Really
Make
People

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Television should be the last mass communication medium to be naively designed and put into the world without a surgeon-general's warning.
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An important technology first creates a problem and then solves it.
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I fear - as far as I can tell - that most undergraduate degrees in computer science these days are basically Java vocational training. I've heard complaints from even mighty Stanford University with its illustrious faculty that basically the undergraduate computer science program is little more than Java certification.
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Perspective is worth 80 IQ points.
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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.
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Artificial intelligence is what we don't know how to do yet
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I hired finishers because I'm a good starter and a poor finisher.
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I think the trick with knowledge is to “acquire it, and forget all except the perfume” - because it is noisy and sometimes drowns out one's own “brain voices”. The perfume part is important because it will help find the knowledge again to help get to the destinations the inner urges pick.
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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.
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If you're not failing 90% of the time, then you're probably not working on sufficiently challenging problems.
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I made up the term object-oriented, and I can tell you I did not have C++ in mind.
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Possibly the only real object-oriented system in working order. (About Internet)
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The greatest single programming language ever designed
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In our society we have hard nerds and soft nerds. The hard nerds are the ones who used to have the slide rules at their belt now they have calculators. The soft nerds are the ones who get violently ill whenever anybody mentions an integral sign.
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We cannot predict the future, but we can invent it.
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The protean nature of the computer is such that it can act like a machine or like a language to be shaped and exploited.
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In computers, every 'new explosion' was set off by a software product that allowed users to program differently.
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Simple things should be simple and complex things should be possible.
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A computer scientist is a machine for converting coffee into urine.
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Technology is anything that wasn't around when you were born.
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