LINC Twentieth Anniversary Symposium (1983)

now pass on the touches of the link on

contemporary computer technology mr.

Alan Kay chief scientist at Arak corporate research

well and I got called on the phone told

dr. Waxman that I couldn't think of anything I'd rather do then come to a

celebration which I think of this as rather than a testimonial of the what I

think of as some of the best design done in our field I am a great fan of good

old things and it is very often the case

that the first of a good old thing has a lot more of the essence of what it

should be then subsequent work for a variety of different reasons when I was

a graduate student in the late 60s I

first met Wes and I remember I I was at

that time working as a consultant for a company that was doing the Machine it

was probably the second personal computer ever done and at that time I

being a graduate student of course all things were possible and I knew everything

I remember being rather discomforted by

some of the questions that Wes asked me about this wonderful machine I was

designing and in fact I realized some

years later that if I'd had better answers to his questions that the machine would have turned out better so

when I was thinking about design I was

struck yesterday yesterday afternoon I went over to All Souls Church in the

district and played organ for a couple of hours in fact that's why I missed the banquet I played much longer than I

thought and it was dark and I did not have the instructions of where the banquet was and it was too late to call

anybody and so in fact I came out here last night this instrument I played on

is sort of an interesting example of design it was built about six or seven

years ago the action on the organ is

completely mechanical a reversion of pipe organ design back to a style

originated in the 12th and 13th centuries so one of the things that the organ

designers over the years discovered that after going to electric actions and

pneumatic actions and all that that the old mechanical design was the best

because the organist can feel the pipe bells opening through his fingers it's a

more sensitive musical instrument the other problem you have in an organ is

you have to change lots of stops this instrument had about 60 different stops

and the designers of this organ had instead of using mechanical stop

changing had a complete computer memory system to allow all the stock

combinations to be set up and changed by just the touch of a button so here we

have 20th century technology which does

not add you can't hear the stops being changed except for the change in the

timbre of the instrument and I thought well that's that is tremendous here is

the best of the old and the best of the new then I discovery one horrible thing

when I sat down to play and that is that the bench was too tall yeah I have I

have slightly shorter legs than the most people particularly from the knees down

and I spent the rest of the afternoon being for several hours being acutely

aware of just how high off the pedal

board my feet were instead of enjoying the music and I like I'd like to say

that I think the best thing you can ever say about a designer and this is definitely true about Wes is that Wes

designs the bench well too

and I think that is what design is all

about because design is really the art of providing a package that provides a

service to the user whether the user is

a person who wants to live in a building and the designers an architect or the

user is a computer user who wants to do

something with a computer the I think one of the reasons why the link turned

out so well is that it was not designed by computer people for computer people

or design to just do a computer it actually had an outside purpose that

helped I think a lot of the design decisions along the way so why it's also

often the case that some of the best computer graphics that's done is not

done by people in the field but by people who actually have pictures they

want to look at so they naturally have a much stronger interest in the kinds of

detail that can be put there and the aesthetics there by the the tape drive

on the link reminds me of my favorite

rubber band story which is the one when

I was at Xerox the one of the system's

programmers that worked for me bought through the whole earth catalogue a gadget called a hydraulic ram pump which

apparently has been around there's one company that makes these and they're made out of cast iron and they've been

around I guess for 130 or 140 years and

what it is is a little metal gadget that you stick in a stream and the water

coming down through the stream eventually put some compresses enough

air in a hemispherical dome and this Ram pump that another that a valve opens and

some water is pumped uphill okay so this

is a pump that will you can water your garden with and the instructions are

very interesting on this humph there's one line that says and

under the maintenance every 40 years please change the leather gasket and

when I saw that thing I said holy Christ

today we can't even design a flush toilet without 20,000 transistors here's

this marvelous machine that has one moving part and one thing that you have

to change every 40 years that reminded

me of a person who was mentioned today also is one of my a guy I never knew but

person I'm a big fan of is gray Walter the old and secular Griffo who built

these cybernetic Turtles he wrote a book in 1951 called the living brain and

which among other things he talks about how he designed these little cybernetic

animals that would go around and be attracted to light and go into courting

dances with each other and so forth and the thing that drove the design of these

little turtles was the fact that he only

had enough power to power two vacuum tubes that's all these things contained

so he actually had to sit down and think about what this thing was going to do

when I read that I thought gee that's that's something that we don't very

often do anymore because we just slather on like putting butter on an English

muffin a few more thousand bites whenever we want to do something but we rarely sit

down and think and design so to me what

the link is all about is I think one of

the three best jobs of design in the early 60s my life these are my three

favorite systems the link Ivan Sutherlands sketchpad and a system

called jaws I won't bother explaining what they are except to say that jaws

was probably the best interactive system pound-for-pound that has ever been done

if you look at total attention to the user

shades of jaws are in all interactive systems today it was a system however

that was remarkably unappreciated for its time since it actually appeared a year before

basic and is nowhere to be seen now because it couldn't be recognized

I think recognition is the hardest thing for people when they're presented with

something new Dec had the most difficult time

recognizing what the link was even with

deference to the remarks of the people from Dec today and so forth the I can

tell you that when I was at a graduate student at the University of Utah we thought about buying some of the Dec

versions of the link and rejected them because they weren't enough of the link

ideas actually in them they in fact threw away the whole integration of the

of the system that was one of the hearts of the link and I think all the link

link users know that one of the great things about it like let's say a

Japanese Honda car is that you didn't

have to decide whether you wanted the hood latch down there by your left hands

the link designers put the hood latch in before you knew that that was something

that you actually wanted all of the things that were important to have as a

total system where delivered to you so what you got was neither a piece of

hardware nor a piece of software but a thing that enacted a service it took me

a long time to realize that oh we have the lights down I'll show you brought

along my little slide the collection

show you a little history

well this is a machine that this is

called the Flex machine and this was a machine that was designed and built in

the period 1967 to 69 and inside the

under the hood there were about 700 ICS

and this machine had about half the computing power of Burroughs be 5000 in

fact it was an attempt to scale down a mainframe computer that directly

executed higher level language code and I learned a lot from that experience

this is actually done as a as a project

for a company the pointing device there

is not an option like the link this machine had no optional features on it

the optional features were that you got to make it do anything you wanted it to but it was an attempt to be a complete

self-contained system for professionals in their field we thought of people like

doctors and lawyers and and so forth

high resolution calligraphic display and

perhaps the first machine to have be ever called a personal computer now the

reason I'm showing this is because this machine actually turned out to be a

failure and when I was doing it I knew

that the link existed and I sort of knew what it was and my my initial hand wave

at the link was to say well hell it's just execute smih sheen code and doesn't

have enough memory and it's to to piddling really small to do what we want

to do what we really need is some power here so we built in a lot of power and

it turned out that the users were repelled by it the fact that had one of

the first window interfaces that was ever done what the users are still repelled by it that we tried out these

things on and it took a few years later

for me to actually understand why and that is that the

what we weren't giving the users was

something that was integrated and user friendly we're simply giving the users something powerful but in which even in

this higher level language they were able to do much less than the lower

level language on the link because the particular way of thinking that they had

to use to use our language was much more foreign than using the link assembly

code so what's the I guess I have a thing here

so now 1968

while we're still working on that other machine I saw at the University of

Illinois the first few little lights on

the first flat panel display called the plasma panel that was done there and I

realized that it wouldn't be long until you could build a computer in which the

only part of it that you saw was the part that did something for you so one

of the ways of thinking about a computer is its maximum size should be the air

the area that subtends the display and you don't want to see anything else so

this idea which is now famous as the Dynabook came to came to life and in

fact when when I went to Xerox this became the project that that I worked on

there with my group so the idea here is a personal personal computer as I

defined it then was something that was so portable that you could carry

something else to 0.5 herniation x' per

block does not count and if you have to

plug it into the wall then you have to think seriously about it because after

all you don't have to plug paper into the wall and you don't have to pull like a pencil into the wall you should be

able to use it out in the grass we thought that the display would be one of

the an eventual liquid crystal display a reflecting display and that if we needed

a keyboard we could display it on the display and use a touch sensitive

surface but that most of the time we wouldn't need a keyboard we just use

pointing operations and so this became one of the three dominant metaphors that

went into the personal computing work done at Xerox PARC and in fact the

this is the machine that we eventually built which incidentally has its 10th

anniversary this year it started working in April 1973 and this machine is a

spiritual D descendant of both the link and some of West Clarke's other ideas

now I have to tell you these these

little technical stories are are kind of perhaps sometimes boring but in between

the time I worked on the Flex machine and the time that we did this machine

one of the things that I saw were West Clarke's documentation and diagrams for

this machine called the tx2 computer and the thing that struck me about that was

not exactly the layout of the machine but that he'd done such a goddamn

aesthetic job on these dot you should see these things you could you could

hang them up put them in a frame most beautiful engineering drawings I've ever

seen of this machine and way of thinking about how it was was done and I realized

that one of the problems with the work that we've been doing is that we weren't

being simple enough we weren't sitting down and thinking long enough and hard enough so in a

couple of years before I went to Xerox I spent a lot more time trying to think

what I what I thought of in those days were linked like thoughts which is

essentially removing features rather than putting them in and so my now in

fact this this machine was kind of a compromise between three strong

personalities one was me and I wanted to

build a machine that looked a lot like in fact one of the so-called portable

computers of today that in fact was going to be a link except we were going

to build it essentially out of a data general Nova but packaged it into a

suitcase and be able to carry it around and do lots of experiments and

it had many of the features that we associate today with micros Butler

Lampson wanted to build a PDP 10 for 500

dollars and Chuck Thacker wanted to build a 10 times faster Nova built out

of eckle and during the summer of 72 I

worked out the human factors of this particular display my main contribution

to this machine actually was the display design how it would look and so forth

most of this machine is attributable to

Chuck Thacker with a little bit of kit would sing by by Butler one side note

just again for those who are technically inclined the major reason why this machine works is that it uses a strategy

of multiple program counters which I believe was first used on the tx2

designed by Wes Clark this one had 16 different program counters and I forgot

how many that the tx2 had has something like 20 I forgot it had some long name

like a multiple selective sequence multiple sequence wes what is it what

was it called multiple sequence

something but the result of it was that

you could switch from one low-level task to another without any overhead at all

and the result of that allowed us to

throw away all of the peripheral controllers in this machine and save a bundle of money which money we put into

memory otherwise almost all of the

feature Hardware features on this machine are exactly the opposite as they were on the Flex machine so when in

doubt do the opposites like with the microphones you don't know what to do do the opposite thing and see what see what

happens and it worked out quite successfully so you see the same kind of

display the shape of the display was there because this the original name of this machine was the interim Dynabook it

was designed to be the functional box to learn about the part of the personal

computer that comprises more than 90% of it and that is the software the reason

we don't have a true personal computer today is because most of the people who

are building them and selling them are simply Hardware people simply software

people are not enough either what you have to have are people who want to

deliver a service machine as a complete package and that is something that we

don't have in a strong fashion yet

here's the this is a pointing device called a mouse that was actually

invented in 1965 by Doug Engelbart and

his group I should mention that most of the ideas that go through this whole

stream and nobody has mentioned it today yet is really are part of what I call

the ARPA dream or the ARPA image of interactive computing which started off

in the very early 60s ARCA was one of the main funders of Lincoln labs and the

work their funders at MIT many of the route 128 companies and some of the

Silicon Valley companies are a direct spin-offs of this particular dream one

of the parts of the dream is that the pointing device is about as optional as

a letter e key one of the things that

you should have on a true personal computer is the display that you can

look at for eight or nine hours without getting eye strain and so a considerable

attention was done this is an example of capturing a printing quality font and I

discovered that by doing a sort of a

Leonardo da Vinci gunnery table version of the modulation transfer function for

human vision that you could get a display to look like that I was taken in 1972 and that was the origin of the

displays that have come become known as the park bitmap displays trying to

understand what you have to put up there so that the human eye will interpret it as information rather than as dots also

one of the things I had always hated about computers is that people never designed on them and I think the reason

is that most computer graphics is very crisp and I felt that design is a kind

of a smudgy process and so you should be able to have smudgy graphics and so part

of the thing that led to this display is to be able to do smudgy kinds of drawings and of course if you have a

display that has about the resolution of a newspaper then you can put up anything

that a newspaper can represent in different fonts and so forth

and finally because display areas are always too small

give me one the site of size of a desk and I want one the size of a wall you

need to have some way of effectively multiplying the ability of the display

to show you information and the solution I came up with which this particular idea was invented around 1971 was

overlapping windows each window actually

is not a static picture but is something that you can think of as the back end of

a telescope that's looking into some simulated world and if you move the

pointer into a window that's partially occluded it pops up to the top instantly

so you can move around and have there's enough sticking out like on the papers

on your desk to remind you what's in each different window so you may have as

many as 10 or 15 different window areas all of different kinds of information in

them and then finally a bunch of us at

Xerox in 1978 did this machine which is called a note-taker which unfortunately had this point 5

herniation is per block feature but it

was the one that directly led actually to the Osborne and other machines Adam

Osborne saw this in an early stage and decided to do his machine I don't

personally think that this particular what it's called form factor and the

gibberish of the trade is right because it's still too big it's it's something

where you can always sit around and make a decision to leave it behind for some good reason and that is not a personal

computer ok lights again please

now I heard this morning that from dr.

Brandt he made a statement that yesterday's breakthrough is today's

graduate seminar is tomorrow's off-the-shelf home entertainment would

that that were true but in fact yesterday's breakthrough is the thing

that is most often forgotten it's not today's graduate seminar and it's

definitely not tomorrow's home entertainment because what usually happens in the the grand tradition of

Hollywood producers sitting around a table looking at a script and saying hey we've got ideas too too often people

it's not a question of not invented here it's a question if I want to invent this

myself and the if you look at the micro

computers that are being sold today you'll see hardly anything that

approximates the kind of total system design that the link had I think we all

can realize that they are not sold as complete packages they're not sold as

Honda's most of the things that you need can't even be plugged into them there

are millions of wires to worry about and so forth but what is that may not be too

surprising because after all that was a garage culture perhaps less forgivable

is the fact that the mini computer industry ignored most of the things in

the link and that's one that I cannot believe since they came out from the

almost the same culture but in fact this idea that you should be able to sell

system components as separable components that you as was jokingly

referred to this morning that the difference between the regular model and the deluxe model was going from four K

to eight K to me is it is a somewhat sad

commentary on the way marketing people think about things because if the user

needs eight K then you should never sell a 4k version

so I also disagreed with him about very

strongly about the goodness of funding and basic research I think that basic

research funding in this in this country except perhaps for the physicists is

pathetic the amount of venture capital

money that's around today is sucking up all the good people from the field and sucking graduate students out of the

schools in fact there's very very little basic research being done in this country

right now the Japanese recognize that

when they put in their 10-year plan for a MIDI of saying now for the first time

we are going to do basic research in computer science what they mean by that

is the age era of check cherry-picking American research is over the reason for

that is that there's very little left to cherry-pick and we're not funding it

ourselves the

back to this design thing I was thinking that as I was going down to the car and

coming back again that elevators have been around a hundred years or more

since Otis invented them but the elevators in this building show a market

disregard for the elemental facts of

elevator design if you notice that it's still possible to get into an elevator

after a hundred years and have it not work properly that really blows my mind

almost blows my mind as much as the overhead rack in certain Jets now you'd

think that if people I'm sure have flown l-1011 s most l-1011 's have an overhead

rack that is about this wide and has a double partition in it so there's almost

nothing that you can put in there now why did they do that how could somebody have done that since

the 747 overhead racks have been around for five or ten years that's exactly the

same kind of obstinate no nothing isn't that we see in our field people are

sitting around saying hey I can design an overhead rack too we don't want that

we don't want innovation for the sake of innovation Tennessee is that much you

know I've noticed in my travels that most people are not geniuses spectacled

early people that call themselves designers and I think that this this

whole area of misplaced improvement of things is one of the most pernicious

things in the field I was just talking to Wes beforehand that it's much much better I think to go back to zero and

start from scratch periodically than to try and prove something that's already

there you may get a different slant on it I think the main thing that you can

get from systems that exist if you're lucky is to try and understand some of

the aesthetics of the of the design this is what I call the siren song of

generality and I think this is this is something you know it's funny I have to

admit my main problem with Wes is that I always I'm getting light hits from him

and I'm it seems to take three or four

years for some of his statements to sink in but he and I were in a little in a

funny little group called educational kits group a long time ago

and he said something that I totally disagreed with back then and I hate to

admit it but I I've changed my mind about it and Wes was going on about what

we should do is this try and design who's talking about designing computers

like appliances I don't know what word he would use but the idea is let's

design a computer that you can't program which to me that's like heresy that's

like telling Christian Scientists about appendicitis you just don't want to hear

words like that and but now I understand

what he meant what he meant is that if you design a computer as though it were

appliance as though you couldn't program it then you get away from the siren song

of generality the the problem with

generality is that because you can do

everything you often try to and the

difference between those two is tremendously profound it's the difference between in art schools when

you go to sculpture class the first time they do not lead you to a lump of clay

and get you to push it around the reason is there are too many things you can do

with that lump of clay instead what they do is they give you a bar of soap and get you to carve it out in irreversible

medium same thing in painting class you get watercolors before you get oils so

you don't get to back up why because you can't do anything really good by

debugging it into existence you have to have an image

now why did it take me so long to learn that much much better to sit down and

pretend that you have only two vacuum tubes like grey Walter and spend that

whole year that you were gonna spend debugging trying to get an image of what

the thing should be and I think this is the this is what the people in the the

search of excellence book mean by keep it simple stupid the hardest thing there

is to any designer because design means power this design is the power to shape

the power to shape is the power to get oneself into deep dark trouble by trying

to do everything that the medium can do instead one should like Bach who was

probably the most had more musical resources under his belt than anybody

that has ever walked this earth could sit and just illuminate one idea for 10

or 15 minutes without straying away from it and be content to let that be the

best illumination of that idea that he could do and I think I'll just close

with that and say that I think Wes Clark is one of the best illuminator of ideas

that I know thank you very much [Applause]