That was a joke about how many things I did that weren’t computing.

Actually, pretty much everything I got fluent at as a “youth” wound up contributing to my later thinking and results as a computerist. For example, I got degrees in both pure math and molecular biology (with minors in English and Anthropology), was a pro jazz guitarist for a number of years, did a lot of most aspects of theatrical production, served in the US Air Force, read a zillion books, etc., and too many more.

When I accidentally wound up in an ARPA research community grad school (U of Utah), what the community was doing was so interesting that I started focusing on it, and using my “misspent youth” to help (for example, the theatre and anthropology were great helps in user interface thinking … math and biology helped with making a kind of “object-oriented programming”, etc.)

I should point out here that “there was no plan, grand or otherwise” — I was simply following my nose. I did decide to get fluent in each interest, but I had no vocational or other plan. I was just “happily curious”. I had no money, so I had to scratch to support myself for all of this, but a “starving student” (even almost literally) on a university campus is surrounded by the riches of the ages to learn and use.

One way to look at all this is that the more you get fluent in, the more ways and things you will have to make analogies to, and these can lead to very different important new thoughts.

Why does Alan Kay call his youth misspent?

Answer (1 of 3): That was a joke about how many things I did that *weren’t* computing. Actually, pretty much everything I got fluent at as a “youth” wound up contributing to my later thinking and results as a computerist. For example, I got degrees in both pure math and molecular biology (with m…

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All of the elements eventually used in the Smalltalk user interface were already to be found in the sixties, as different ways to access and invoke the functionality provided by an interactive system. The two major centers of ideas were Lincoln Labs and RAND corp, both ARPA funded. The big shift that consolidated these ideas into a powerful theory and long-lived examples came because the LRG [Learning Research Group] focus was on children. Hence, we were thinking about learning as being one of the main effects we wanted to have happen. Early on, this led to a 90 degree rotation of the purposed of the user interface from "access to functionality" to "environment in which users learn by doing." This new stance could now respond to the echos of Montessori and Dewey, particularly the former, and got me, on rereading Jerome Bruner, to think beyond the children's curriculum to a "curriculum of the user interface."

The particular aim of LRG was to find the equivalent of writing – that is, learning and thinking by doing in a medium – our new "pocket universe." For various reasons I had settled on "iconic programming" as the way to achieve this, drawing on the iconic representations used by many ARPA projects in the sixties. My friend Nicholas Negroponte, an architect, was extremely interested in how environments affected peoples' work and creativity. He was interested in embedding the new computer magic in familiar surroundings. I had quite a bit of theatrical experience in a past life, and remembered Coleridge's adage that "people attend 'bad theatre' hoping to forget, people attend 'good theatre' aching to remember." In other words, it is the ability to evoke the audience's own intelligence and experiences that makes theatre work.

Putting all this together, we want an apparently free environment in which exploration causes desired sequences to happen (Montessori); one that allows kinaesthetic, iconic, and symbolic learning – "doing with images makes symbols" (Piaget & Bruner); the user is never trapped in a mode (GRAIL); the magic is embedded in the familiar (Negroponte); and which acts as a magnifying mirror for the user's own intelligence (Coleridge). It would be a great finish to ths story to say that having articulated this, we were able to move straightforwardly to the design as we know it today. In fact, the UI design work happened in fits and starts in between feeding Smalltalk itself, designing children's experiments, trying to understand iconic construction, and just playing around. In spite of this meandering, the context almost forced a good design to turn out anyway.

The Early History Of Smalltalk

Knowing more than your own field is really helpful in [thinking creatively]. I've always thought that one of the reasons the 1960s was so interesting is that nobody was a computer scientist back then. Everybody who came into it came into it with lots of other knowledge and interests. Then they tried to figure what computers were, and the only place they could use for analogies were other areas. So we got some extremely interesting ideas from that.

And of course, the reason being educated is important is simply because you don't have any blue [orthogonal] contexts if you don't have any other kinds of knowledge to think with. Engineering is one of the hardest fields to be creative in, just because it's all about optimizing, and you don't optimize without being very firmly anchored to the context you're in. What we're talking about here is something that is not about optimization, but about rotating the point of view.

Visions not Goals

What made all this work were a few simple principles articulated and administered with considerable purity. For example, it is no exageration to say that ARPA/PARC had "visions rather than goals" and "funded people, not projects". The vision was "interactive computing as a complementary intellectual partner for people pervasively networked world-wide". By not trying to derive specific goals from this at the funding side, ARPA/PARC was able to fund rather different and sometimes opposing points of view. For example, Engelbart and McCarthy had extremely different ways of thinking of the ARPA dream, but ideas from both of their research projects are important parts of today's interactive computing and networked world.

Giving a professional illustrator a goal for a poster usually results in what was desired. If one tries this with an artist, one will get what the artist needed to create that day. Sometimes we make, to have, sometimes to know and express. The pursuit of Art always sets off plans and goals, but plans and goals don't always give rise to Art. If "visions not goals" opens the heavens, it is important to find artistic people to conceive the projects.

Thus the "people not projects" principle was the other cornerstone of ARPA/PARC's success. Because of the normal distribution of talents and drive in the world, a depressingly large percentage of organizational processes have been designed to deal with people of moderate ability, motivation, and trust. We can easily see this in most walks of life today, but also astoundingly in corporate, university, and government research.

ARPA/PARC had two main thresholds: self-motivation ability. They cultivated people who "had to do, paid or not" and "whose doings were likely to be highly interesting important". Thus conventional oversight was not only not needed, but was not really possible. "Peer review" wasn't easily done even with actual peers. The situation was "out of control", yet extremely productive and not at all anarchic.

"Out of control" because artists have to do what they have to do. "Extremely productive" because a great vision acts like a magnetic field from the future that aligns all the little iron particle artists to point to "North" without having to see it. They then make their own paths to the future. Xerox often was shocked at the PARC process and declared it out of control, but they didn't understand that the context was so powerful and compelling and the good will so abundant, that the artists worked happily at their version of the vision. The results were an enormous collection of breakthroughs, some of which we are celebrating today.

Our game is more like art and sports than accounting, in that high percentages of failure are quite OK as long as enough larger processes succeed. Ty Cobb's lifetime batting average was "only" .368, which means that he failed almost 2/3s of the time. But the critical question is: what happened in the 1/3 in which he was succeeding? If the answer is "great things" then this is all the justification that should be needed. Unless I'm badly mistaken, in most processes today-and sadly in most important areas of technology research-the administrators seem to prefer to be completely in control of mediocre processes to being "out of control" with superproductive processes. They are trying to "avoid failure" rather than trying to "capture the heavens".

https://tinlizzie.org/VPRIPapers/m2004001_power.pdf

All the different ways companies have invented to kill that goose [that lays the golden eggs]. One of them is, just eat it. Forget about those eggs. ...

"Only one gold egg every twelve?" "I want gold coins rather than golden eggs." "I want platinum eggs." No! You can buy platinum with the gold from these eggs.

Make the goose a manager. Give the goose a deadline. Require the goose to explain to you how they're going to make the next egg.

This is just at the level of ridiculousness that's going on. Nobody who [thinks like this] has ever laid a golden egg. It's not their business. Their business is to count those golden eggs after they get laid.

"Learn everything, and then forget it except for the perfume". This will allow you to think your own thoughts, and when you come up with an interesting idea, it will first be somewhat influenced by good ideas in the past, and it will also have perfume that will help you find what was done on this idea in the past.
—Alan Kay

So we've got this present, it comes out of one set of things in the past that we're vaguely aware of, and gives rise to an incremental future. But the truth is that the past is vast. It's enormous! There are billions of people contributing to the past. And every time we think the present is real, we cannot see the rest of the past. So we have to destroy the present.

Once you get rid of it, it's a scary situation, because you said, "I'm not going to have anything based on the past." Of course that's not possible; you're just trying. But sometimes you get a little feeling. And this not an idea; it's just a feeling. It's like an odor of perfume. But the fun thing is that little feeling can actually lead you to look in the past in different places than you normally do, and you can bring those up to that feeling. And once you do that, that feeling starts expanding into a vision, and the vision expands into an actual idea... Some of the most creative people I know actually operate this way. This is where those ideas come from that are not just incremental to the present. They come out of vague, even muscular sensations, that you have to go chasing to find out what they are. If you try to get the idea too early, it can only be in terms of the present.

http://www.tele-task.de/archive/video/flash/14029/

Living organisms are shaped by evolution to survive, not necessarily to get a clear picture of the universe. For example, frogs' brains are set up to recognize food as moving objects that are oblong in shape. So if we take a frog's normal food – flies – paralyze them with a little chloroform and put them in front of the frog, it will not notice them or try to eat them.

It will starve in front of its food! But if we throw little rectangular pieces of cardboard at the frog it will eat them until it is stuffed! The frog only sees a little of the world we see, but it still thinks it perceives the whole world.

Now, of course, we are not like frogs! Or are we?

http://www.vpri.org/pdf/m2004002_center.pdf

https://tinlizzie.org/VPRIPapers/m2004002_center.pdf

Thanks to Bret Victor (worrydream.com) for storing these quotes

Quotes

Alan Moore