Misc Kay Bits

In pursuit of his passion with music, AlanKay flew up to Portland, OR in 1998 on behalf of Disney Imagineering for a day of exploring the technical and musical capabilities of an electronic pipe organ designed and manufactured by Rodgers Instruments, where I worked in the Software group.

Over lunch he shared some gems of knowledge (these are personal recollections and not to be interpreted as verbatim quotes):

• Career paths: As the VP of Atari, he felt the responsibility of being a manager was counter to the spiritual pursuit of improving peoples lives through technological innovation. Money and power are no substitutes for rewards brought on by research. A lesson learned the hard way.
• The bean bags often found lying around the rooms at XeroxParc had a higher purpose than to lend to the informality of the culture. When someone was brainstorming at a whiteboard, the bean bags made it much more difficult for peers to get up and interrupt!
• He spoke at length about the concept of "4D" in the context of Disney cel animation. 4D implying the time dimension managed by animators when moving cells at varying speeds so that the far background moves slower than the immediate foreground.
• Much of his ground breaking ObjectOriented UI work was largely the result of trying to make computers accessible to children. Children, he reasons, could understand computers much more easily though sounds and images rather than punch cards and command line consoles (a rather contrarian viewpoint in the 60's and 70's, but taken for granted today).

One of my favorite quotes, attributed to Alan: "The only way to predict the future is to invent it."

--MichaelLeach

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In 1997 I had the opportunity to help design and deliver a most unusual introduction to object-oriented thinking for senior IT managers with Alan Kay, and with the wonderful BettyEdwards?, the author of DrawingOnTheRightSideOfTheBrain. We ran the 3-day course twice, both times at the Disney Institute in Florida. Each morning and each afternoon started with a hour of Betty teaching these executives to draw, which, if you know her book, is really all about learning to see differently (e.g. seeing the 'negative space' around stuff). The concept was that understanding OO was all about learning to see the problem space differently.

Then Alan would come on and do an hour supposedly on the theory behind OO, which meant that he mostly talked about things that interested him in biology, philosophy, history, Zen Buddhism, music, mathematics... For the last hour of each half day I would come on and try to bring it back to the subject of the workshop, for which the client had paid a very large sum of money.

Presenting on OO in front of Alan is stressful enough. (I have known him for many years and love the man). But almost everything I said he would interrupt and contradict. So I would try to explain to these absolute OO novices the difference between an object 'class' and an 'instance' and Alan would interrupt and say: 'But a class is just an instance of class Class!'

I recently met up with several of the executives who attended that course. They couldn't remember a single thing from the course - except for the drawing!

On another occasion I asked Alan: 'If you were doing the early Smalltalk work over again, what would you do differently?'. He replied that the early version of the Smalltalk GUI had many, many classes. If he was doing it again, he said, he would only use one class! 'What's the class?' I asked, incredulously. His initial answer, echoing a wonderful remark by Jack Palance in the film City Slickers, was 'That's what you've got to find out.'. Later, Alan relented and defined the class as 'a smart rectangle that can contain other smart rectangles'. -- RichardPawson