The computer "revolution" hasn't happened yet!Alan Kay
The computer "revolution" hasn't happened yet!
by Alan Kay · first published 1998
17mentions
4recommended by
13HN commenters
2009–2026first – last mentioned
31% recommend69% neutral
Kay speaks about the history of personal computing and its parallels with the history of the printed book; the evolution of societies and how the knowledge we need to learn has changed; demonstrates a computer environment that allows new ways of learning on computers and conveys the conceptual evolution that is to come in using computers for learning.
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…Let me ask you, what are your all time most favorite talks/seminars/long interviews available online? They might be related to tech, they might not be, as well. Here are some of mine: - Alan Kay: The Computer Revolution Hasn't Happened Yet OOPSLA 97 Keynote (VPRI 0719) (https://youtu.be/aYT2se94eU0) - David Silver: AlphaGo, AlphaZero, and Deep Reinforcement Learning | Lex Fridman Podcast #86 (https://youtu.be/uPUEq8d73JI) - Functional…
on “Ask HN: What are your most favorite conference talks/seminars available online?” ↗…what hampers evolution is the technology we choose (Java, C) and not the problem itself (drawing interactive elements on the screen). For anyone interested in this discussion I recommend Alan Kay's "The Computer Revolution hasn't happened yet": www.youtube.com/watch?v=oKg1hTOQXoY
on “The Future Programming Manifesto” ↗Concepts such as cloud computing are so old, it's pathetic they are not widely used. You should dig into Alan Kay's "The Computer Revolution Hasn't Happened Yet." The biggest barriers aren't technological, they're cultural and conceptual. When Gutenburg invented the printing press, did you instantly have serialized novels, political pamphlets, abstruse philosophical…
on “Microsoft’s Creative Destruction ” ↗…benefits to having real implementers and real users, and there are benefits to starting from scratch every few months. I'd recommend his talks at OOPSLA or anything you can find on YouTube. Especially 'The Computer Revolution Hasn't Happened Yet' is a gospel for contrarians.
on “Paradoxes of Software Architecture (2012)” ↗The Computer Revolution hasn't happened yet, OOPSLA 1997 keynote https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oKg1hTOQXoY Others have already mentioned The Early History of Smalltalk, highly recommended. You'll probably want to read it a couple of times,…
on “Alan Kay's talk at UCLA – Feb 2024 [video]” ↗…To your credit, your version is more succinct and to the point. btw, multi-touch has been around in one form or another since 1982... The culture still lags the research labs by decades. See "The computer revolution hasn't happened yet" by Alan Kay. So by your use of "revolutionary," the Gutenberg press wasn't because movable type predated it and he just used it to replicate Bibles in 2 better, faster way. This is not an order of…
on “Who Fatally Wounded Microsoft? It Was Bill Gates.” ↗…the laptop lid I have no idea what will happen when I open it again. More often than not some application and its state just disappears into the computational ether. One of Alan Kay's slogans is "The computer revolution hasn't happened yet" and he's mostly right. What we have are glorified calculators and media players instead of programmable devices that can augment intelligence and it's because the main runtimes/operating systems on these…
on “Stop Writing Dead Programs [video]” ↗…reached the point I'm thinking about. Tablet computing will finally have arrived. (Alan Kay's "Dynabook.") Technology seeps into the culture only after decades and lots of false starts. (Alan Kay's "The Computer Revolution hasn't happened yet.")
on “Google to sell eBooks” ↗He also mentions that new tools designed to alleviate problems and up just causing more. I think this is a symptom of inflexible computing "architecture" -- what Alan Kay refers to in "The Computer Revolution Hasn't Happened Yet". Our own tools cause incidental complexity -- complexity arising not from the problems, but from the way we solve them. And so it becomes harder to build things, as we strain against architectural limits.
on “I hate computers: confessions of a sysadmin” ↗In the words of Alan Kay, "The computer revolution hasn't happened yet." Instead, it is happening. It took two decades for megabit LAN, 300+ DPI printers, WYSIWYG word processors, etc to become mainstream fixtures of the office. It also took awhile for OO to become mainstream.…
on “Will a Two Tier Market For Developers Emerge As a Result of Scala & Clojure?” ↗>Is that a joke? C++'s approach to OO is practically antithetical to Smalltalk's. There's a famous Alan Kay quote about it. Alan Kay's C++ quote comes from his speech, "The Computer Revolution Hasn't Happened Yet": http://blog.moryton.net/2007/12/computer-revolution-hasnt-ha... "...it's interesting, again, to look at what is actually being done in the world under the name of OOP. I've been shown some very, very…
on “The Smalltalk Revolution” ↗I went and looked the Alan Kay thing up. It's not calculus, just acceleration. Sorry! It's described in "The Real Computer Revolution Hasn’t Happened Yet" http://www.vpri.org/pdf/m2007007a_revolution.pdf in the section titled "Children Discover, Measure, and Mathematically Model Galilean Gravity" I think an important piece of the puzzle (no pun intended)…
on “The “Windmill” Problem on the 2011 International Mathematical Olympiad [video]” ↗…trying to find a match between available appointment times (supplied by the agents of individual providers through their Web sites) and Pete’s and Lucy’s busy schedules. I think Alan Kay is right, the computer revolution hasn't happened yet. There is much potential that computer networks can unlock but we haven't done the work to unlock it. -- https://twobithistory.org/2018/05/27/semantic-web.html
on “Marketers Have Given Up on Context, and Our National Discourse Is Suffering” ↗This reminds me of Alan Kay's OOPSLA 1997 presentation "The Computer Revolution Hasn’t Happened Yet" when he describes the Air Force / Burroughs 220 file format from 1961 where the file/tape contained both the data and the procedures to read/write/print them: https://youtu.be/oKg1hTOQXoY?t=1355
on “F3” ↗…lead developers of Smalltalk, said it was also valued for being good for bootstrapping ideas for building systems. He went into that topic starting at 58:50 in this talk: Alan Kay at OOPSLA 1997 - The computer revolution hasn’t happened yet https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oKg1hTOQXoY&t=3530s “To me the most distressing thing that happened to Smalltalk when it came out of Xerox PARC was for many respects and purposes it quit changing. Now…
on “Cuis: The Modern Smalltalk-80” ↗