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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.

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
Person
Scratches
Typical
Hungry
Surface
Wise
Boardroom
Tell
Cavemen
Stories
Briefcases
Persons
Scratch

More quotes by Alan Kay

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The real romance is out ahead and yet to come. The computer revolution hasn't started yet.
Alan Kay
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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.
Alan Kay
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A change in perspective is worth 80 IQ points. Perspective is worth 80 IQ points. Point of view is worth 80 IQ points
Alan Kay
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The computer is simply an instrument whose music is ideas.
Alan Kay
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Humans are communications junkies. We just can't get enough.
Alan Kay
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People who are really serious about software should make their own hardware.
Alan Kay
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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.
Alan Kay
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The only way you can predict the future is to build it.
Alan Kay
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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.
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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Science requires a society because even people who are trying to be good thinkers love their own thoughts and theories - much of the debugging has to be done by others.
Alan Kay
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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.
Alan Kay
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An important technology first creates a problem and then solves it.
Alan Kay
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Knowledge is silver. Outlook is gold. IQ is a lead weight.
Alan Kay
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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.
Alan Kay
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Simple things should be simple and complex things should be possible.
Alan Kay
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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.
Alan Kay
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Possibly the only real object-oriented system in working order. (About Internet)
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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It's easier to invent the future than to predict it.
Alan Kay