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Technology is anything that wasn't around when you were born.

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
Anything
Wasn
Technology
Born
Around

More quotes by Alan Kay

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In success there's a tendency to keep on doing what you were doing.
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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.
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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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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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In computers, every 'new explosion' was set off by a software product that allowed users to program differently.
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A computer scientist is a machine for converting coffee into urine.
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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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Simple things should be simple and complex things should be possible.
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A new friend is new wine, when it grows old, you will enjoy drinking it.
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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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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 most disastrous thing that you can ever learn is your first programming language.
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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.
Alan Kay
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Technology is anything invented after you were born, everything else is just stuff.
Alan Kay
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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.
Alan Kay
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To get the medium's magic to work for one's aims rather than against them is to attain literacy.
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There is the desire of a consumer society to have no learning curves. This tends to result in very dumbed-down products that are easy to get started on, but are generally worthless and/or debilitating.
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If you're not failing 90% of the time, then you're probably not working on sufficiently challenging problems.
Alan Kay
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It's all about long-term, sustaining relationships.
Alan Kay
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It's easier to invent the future than to predict it.
Alan Kay