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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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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
Soft
Nerds
Used
Ill
Violently
Hard
Sign
Integral
Whenever
Slide
Rules
Belt
Anybody
Slides
Ones
Belts
Calculators
Nerd
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Society

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The biggest problem we have as human beings is that we confuse our beliefs with reality.
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The best way to predict the future is to invent it.
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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
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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.
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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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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.
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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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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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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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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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Humans are communications junkies. We just can't get enough.
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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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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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If you're utopian, you're never satisfied.
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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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