These drawings date from 1982 (thirty years ago). Alan Kay had just become the Chief Scientist at Atari and he asked me to work with him to continue the work I started at Encyclopedia Britannica on the idea of an Intelligent Encyclopedia. We came up with these scenarios of how the (future) encyclopedia might be used and commissioned Glenn Keane, a well-known Disney animator to render them. The captions also date from 1982.

The most interesting thing for me today about these images is that although we foresaw that people would be accessing information wirelessly (notice the little antenna on the device in the "tide pool" image, we completely missed the most important aspect of the network -- that it was going to connect people to other people.

"Learning to become computationally expressive is more important than ever. But I want to suggest that there is a utility for procedural literacy that extends far beyond the ability to program computers. Computer processing comprises only one register of procedurality. More generally, I want to suggest that procedural literacy entails the ability to reconfigure basic concepts and rules to understand and solve problems, not just on the computer, but in general."

"The things which I’ve painted as trivial here are admittedly anything but. But they are, I sincerely believe, how we’re going to handle — have to handle — the human interface to this so-called Internet of Things we keep talking about. Each of the networked resources in the world, whether location or service or object or human being, is going to have to be characterized in a consistent, natural, interoperable way, and we’re going to have to offer folks equally high-level environments for process composition using these resources. We’re going to have to devise architectures and frameworks that let ordinary people everywhere interact with all the networked power that is everywhere around them, and do so in a way that doesn’t add to their existing burden of hassle and care.

"the corpus of people able to develop functionality, to “program” for a given system, has been dwindling as a percentage of interactive technology’s total userbase…Alan Kay’s definition of full technical literacy, remember, was the ability to both read & write in a given medium — to create, as well as consume. And by these lights, we’ve been moving further & further away from literacy & the empowerment it so reliably entrains for a very long time now. … we need to articulate a way of thinking about interactive functionality & its development that is appropriate to an era in which virtually everyone on the planet spends some portion of their day using networked devices; to a context in which such devices & interfaces are utterly pervasive in the world, & the average person is confronted with a multiplicity of same in the course of a day; and to the cloud architecture that undergirds that context. Given these constraints, neither applications nor “apps” are quite going to cut it"

"I was digging through some files the other day and found this document from 1997. It gathers a set of quotes from issues of Wired magazine in its first five years. I don't recall why I created this (or even if I did compile all of them), but I suspect it was for our fifth anniversary issue. I don't think we ever ran any of it. Reading it now it is clear that all predictions of the future are really just predictions of the present. Here it is in full:"

"the skills that are easiest to teach and test are also the ones that are easiest to digitize and outsource

"deepest and most important parts of real science cannot be learned from a book, computer, from just doing mathematics no matter how wonderful. The notion that they can has been a major misconception for 1000s of years & is shockingly widespread in the US educational system. This is because all representation systems we use, including the ones inside our heads, are ultimately hermetic, and thus in the end are only about themselves. Science is a kind of negotiation between our representation systems and "what's out there?". And the negotiation is always there. As Richard Feynmann liked to say "Science means you don't have to trust the experts"...Because scientific knowledge is now large, it is not possible to learn all of science from doing personal experiments. The major point here is that the "outlook" (simple name for "epistemological stance") of science has to be internalized before one can understand just how to garner scientific knowledge from writings rather from the real world."

"While the people debated whether OLPC is related to Taiwanese net-books or American e-ink gizmos; new learning paradigms were being created: free choice learning, action learning, cooperative learning (not to be confused with collaborative learning), adventure learning, project learning, integrated studies, youth voice, service-learning, and community-based. They are all being used in environments in which the formal school system has failed or the parents have given the schools a vote of no confidence."

"BusinessWeek Senior Writer Steve Hamm's new book, The Race for Perfect: Inside the Quest to Design the Ultimate Portable Computer, chronicles the four-decade history of mobile computing. This graphic adaptation explores the role of Alan Kay, whose ideas shaped the development of today’s laptops, handhelds, and smartphones." via: http://blog.ted.com/2008/11/alan_kay_the_gr.php

"More news from ESUG 2008: The Squeak NOS project now boots on the OLPC computer. Read more here (french). A video of the boot process is available here and some comments/code here." [via: http://www.oblomovka.com/wp/2008/09/02/the-dynabook-javascript-and-real-computer-literacy/]

via: http://www.oblomovka.com/wp/2008/09/02/the-dynabook-javascript-and-real-computer-literacy/

"We want to get rid of the operating system under Squeak. For this we know we will need to implement lots of low level things, we are not afraid, but we want to take a little different approach: Implement the bare minimum as native code (a mix of assembly and C), and then do everything else in Squeak. The people originally in the group only knew low level PC stuff, so we started with this, however there is already people participating that want to give Apple/PowerPC a try!"

"In the Dynabook, the aim was to bring the dynamism of the computer to the masses: tools to be able to create pictures as easily as words, and animation as easily as both: but all of them really just subsets of -- not programming, but whatever it is that computers provide us as an opportunity. "Interaction" sucks as a term, but I think we may be stuck with it. The Dynabook -- and Alan Kay's dream still remains -- an educational project. What was it trying to teach? I think what it was trying to teach was what I was lucky to get at eight because of my dad's fictional computer, and which I genuinely believe everyone can, and should have. ... I don't know how we got to Gutenberg to universal literacy, but that's the path we need to walk down now. I want true literacy for my daughter."

"Whilst Stallman calls for “sharing” , in New Zealand schools we identify “relating to others” and “participating and contributing” as worthy...But listening to our current arguments over copyright, DRM, A2K makes me suspect that many of us no longer understand what sharing might be .... probably because we have unconsciously adopted the thinking of consumerism and business ... we can only imagine living in a society predicated upon consumption and the accumulation of personal advantage/ wealth."

"powerful new open source software development environment & software infrastructure for creating & deploying deeply collaborative multi-user online applications & metaverses on & across multiple operating systems & devices. Derived from Squeak"

"after reminding us that "the world is not what it seems," he shows us how good programming can sharpen our picture. His unique software lets children learn by doing, but also learn by computing & by creating lessons themselves."

"Our larger goal is encouraging kids and adults to use the laptops to their full potential, which can have profound educational benefits."

"The following list was prepared by Alan Kay for his students and is presented here for those who want to learn more about the ideas and philosophies that influenced the creation of Squeak." nice list, includes 2 by John Holt

"1. innovation happens as a result of bringing together knowledge, IQ and point of view 2. Don’t worry about whether something is right or wrong, just try to find out what is going on 3. How come there isn’t a Moore’s Law for software?"

"Pekka was talking about people’s boldness and it’s role in creativity. Boldness is crucial in creativity. Children are bold. They are not afraid to say what do they think. This brings in my mind two things that are related to Pekka’s lectures and t

"massive disconnect between how we teach math and science and how mathematicians and scientists work....NOT the logical, left-brain symbols associated with their work... fuzzier. Intuition. Visualization. Sensation. Anthropomorphizing. Metaphors."

"the reason I work with children and not adults is because adults are famously difficult to change in any significant way. They've made a commitment to the norms of the world they live in"

"the reason I work with children and not adults is because adults are famously difficult to change in any significant way"

defining technology

"Alan lines up a number of systems including Englebart's Sketchpad, the FlexMachine, the RAND tablet and Smalltalk, all of which were way ahead of their time and demonstrate some concepts not carried through even today."