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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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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.
Alan Kay
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Humans are communications junkies. We just can't get enough.
Alan Kay
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I made up the term object-oriented, and I can tell you I did not have C++ in mind.
Alan Kay
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Some people worry that artificial intelligence will make us feel inferior, but then, anybody in his right mind should have an inferiority complex every time he looks at a flower.
Alan Kay
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I don't know how many of you have ever met Dijkstra, but you probably know that arrogance in computer science is measured in nano-Dijkstras.
Alan Kay
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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.
Alan Kay
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Change is easy, except for the changed part.
Alan Kay
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People who are really serious about software should make their own hardware.
Alan Kay
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The greatest single programming language ever designed
Alan Kay
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An important technology first creates a problem and then solves it.
Alan Kay
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The biggest problem we have as human beings is that we confuse our beliefs with reality.
Alan Kay
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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.
Alan Kay
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A computer scientist is a machine for converting coffee into urine.
Alan Kay
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Java and C++ make you think that the new ideas are like the old ones. Java is the most distressing thing to hit computing since MS-DOS.
Alan Kay
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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.
Alan Kay
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Possibly the only real object-oriented system in working order. (About Internet)
Alan Kay
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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.
Alan Kay
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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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In computers, every 'new explosion' was set off by a software product that allowed users to program differently.
Alan Kay
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Artificial intelligence is what we don't know how to do yet
Alan Kay