Inventing The Future With Alan Kay

By Howard Rheingold

	 Ever since he learned to read at the age of two and a half, Alan Kay has been accustomed to doing things his own way and letting the rest of the world catch up later.  Ten years before he coined the term "personal computer," before Atari or Xerox PARC existed, and before another pair of bright insubordinates named Wozniak and Jobs created a new meaning for that good old American word "Apple," Alan Kay was demonstrating FLEX, a personal computer in all but name, to the ARPA graduate students' conference. In 1969, he was awarded a Ph.D. for the design of the first graphical, object-oriented, computer. 
	As one of the young computer wizards who had been funded and encouraged by the Defense Department's Advanced Research Projects Agency (ARPA), he participated in the creation of the ARPAnet. Later, at Xerox Palo Alto Research Center, he was the inspiration and creative leader of the team who created the Alto, the first personal computer, in the early 1970s.
	"The best way to predict the future is to invent it" is a phrase long associated with Alan Kay, who knows whereof he speaks. In the 1960s, he started dreaming about the kinds of easy to use, graphical, portable computers that millions of people use today. Not only did he want to do away with the computer priesthood and old fashioned programming methods of the mainframe era to create a personal computer that a creative person could use on his or her desktop, he insisted that these new computers should be designed for children to use.
	 For Alan, being ahead of everybody else started out as a pleasure and quickly turned into a survival trait--which meant he didn't do too well in school, or anyplace else, until the summer of his fifteenth year, when "a music camp in Oneonta, New York, changed my entire life."
	Music became the center of his life.  He never understood why his two favorite toys -- books and musical instruments -- could not be combined into a single medium capable of dealing with both sounds and symbols.  He worked as a professional jazz and rock guitarist for ten years.  When it looked like he was about to be drafted, Kay joined the U.S. Air Force as a navigational cadet.  In the Air Force, he "wore out a pair of shoes doing insubordination duty," but he also learned that he had a knack for computer programming.
	After he finished his Air Force duty, he earned a degree in biology, but his college grades were as mixed as they had always been, because of his habit of concentrating intently on only those things that interested him.  Through what Alan now calls "sheer luck," he came to the attention of somebody smart enough to actually teach something to a smartass like Alan Kay -- and bold enough to admit a student with an undergraduate  record that read more like a rap sheet than a transcript.
	The man who gambled on Kay's checkered history in academia was David Evans, the chairman of the computer science department at the University of Utah.  One of the people Evans managed to recruit for the Utah department who had an impact, not only in Alan Kay but on the entire course of personal computing was Ivan Sutherland, the graduate student  who single-handedly created the field of computer graphics as a part of his MIT Ph.D. thesis-- \the now legendary program known as "Sketchpad."
	People like Alan Kay still get excited when they talk about Sketchpad:  "Sketchpad had wonderful aspects, besides the fact that it was the first real computer graphics program.  It was not just a tool to draw things.  It was a program that obeyed laws that you wanted to be held true.  So to draw a square in Sketchpad, you drew a line with a lightpen and said: 'Copy-copy-copy, attach-attach-attach.  That angle is 90 degrees, and these four things are to be equal.'  Sketchpad would go zap! and you'd have a square."
	Kay showed up at Utah in November of 1966.  His first task was to read a pile of manuscript Evans gave him -- Ivan Sutherland's thesis.  Evans put Kay together with a hardware genius named Ed Cheadle.  Ed had an idea about doing a tabletop computer.  Kay worked on FLEX--his first personal computer software design--from 1967 to 1969.  
	 FLEX was an attempt to use the more advanced electronic components that had recently become available to bring more of the computer's power out where the individual user could interact with it.  FLEX was a significant innovation technically, but it was complicated and delicate, and in Kay's words, "users found it repellent to learn."  The problem wasn't in the machinery as much as it was in the special language the user had to master in order to command the power of the machine to accomplish useful tasks.  That was when Kay first vowed to make sure his personal computer would come at least part of the way toward the person who was to use it, and when he realized that software design would be the area in which this desire could be fulfilled.
	Although he didn't fully realize it yet, Alan Kay was beginning to think about designing a new programming language.  The kind of language he began to yearn for would be a tool for using the computer as a kind of universal simulator.  The problem was that programming languages were demonically esoteric.  "There are two ways to think about building an instrument," Kay asserts.  "You can build something like a violin that only a few talented artists can play.  Or you can make something like a pencil that can be used quickly and easily for anything from learning the alphabet to drawing to writing a computer program."  He was convinced that 99 percent of the problem to be solved in making a truly usable personal computer program were software problems: "By 1966, everyone knew where the silicon was going."
	Besides FLEX, Kay's other project at Utah was to make some software work.  He got a pile of tape canisters on his desk, along with a note that the tapes were supposed to contain a scientific programming language known as Algol 60, but they didn't work.  It was a maddening software puzzle that was still far from solved when Kay figured out that it wasn't Algol 60 but a language from Norway, of all places, called Simula..  In a 1984 interview, Kay described what happened when he finally printed out on paper the program listings stored in those mysterious canisters and figured out what was on those tapes: "We couldn't understand any of the papers, they were sort of transliterated from the Norwegian. . . . We spread out the program listings and actually went through the machine code to try to figure out what was happening -- and I suddenly realized that Simula was a programming language to do what Sketchpad did.  I had never really understood what Sketchpad was.  I get shivers now thinking of it.  It rotated my point of view through a different dimension and nothing has been the same since.  I suddenly understood the purpose of higher level languages."
	When he came across Seymour Papert's work on LOGO a computer language for children, during the time he was meditating about the fact that he had put two years into the FLEX machine only to find that it wasn't amenable to humans who tried to use it, Alan Kay recalls that "it was like a light going on in my head.  I knew I would never design another program that was not set up for children."
	Although he knew he had a monstrous software task ahead of him if he was to create a means by which even children could use computers as a simulation tool, his FLEX experience and his exposure to LOGO convinced Kay that there was far more to it than just building an easy-to-operate computer and creating a new kind of computer language.  It was something akin to the problem of building a tool that a child could use to build a sandcastle, but would be equally useful to architects who wanted to erect skyscrapers.  What he had in mind was an altogether new kind of artifact:  
	Kay began to understand that what he wanted to create was an entirely new medium that would be fundamentally different from all the previous static media of history.  This was going to be the first dynamic medium -- a means of representing, communicating, and animating thoughts, dreams, and fantasies as well as words, images, and sounds.
	Kay pursuded his goal of designing a new kind of computer language, first at Stanford Artificial Intelligence Laboratory, then at the newly founded Xerox Palo Alto Research Center, where it eventually emerged as "Smalltalk," running on the new "Alto" computers..  After leaving PARC, Kay directed a short-lived laboratory for Atari, became an Apple "Fellow," and conducted research at MIT's Media Lab.
	An evening with Alan Kay is more than an encounter with one of the great pioneers of personal computing. He never stops challenging himself and others to think ahead, to invent the future that ought to be. 

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