Quote

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.

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
Something
Demand
Believe
Normal
People
Becomes
Sort
Quite
Threshold
Situation
Voting
Whatever
Reached
Everyone
Demands

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The computer is simply an instrument whose music is ideas.
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The most disastrous thing that you can ever learn is your first programming language.
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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.
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Don't worry about what anybody else is going to do. The best way to predict the future is to invent it.
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The flip side of the coin was that even good programmers and language designers tended to do terrible extensions when they were in the heat of programming, because design is something that is best done slowly and carefully.
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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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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.
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As far as Apple goes, it was a different company every few years from the time I joined in 1984.
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Having an intelligent secretary does not get rid of the need to read, write, and draw, etc. In a well functioning world, tools and agents are complementary.
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Technology is anything that wasn't around when you were born.
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It's all about long-term, sustaining relationships.
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The real romance is out ahead and yet to come. The computer revolution hasn't started yet.
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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.
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The only way you can predict the future is to build 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.
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A new friend is new wine, when it grows old, you will enjoy drinking it.
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The best way to predict the future is to invent it.
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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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Simple things should be simple and complex things should be possible.
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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.
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