A Conversation with Alan Kay (1989)

hello I'm Michael Markman in the early days of computers when they cost

multiple millions dollars were housed behind glass walls intended by

specialists it was hard to think of them as personal and yet today there's more

processing power in personal computers than there is in mainframes

one of the people responsible for that change is with us today he's dr. Alan Kay he's now a fellow with

Apple Computer and he's responsible for changing the way we look at computers

and the way computers look to us Alan how does it feel to be known as one of

the fathers of personal computing well as they say success has a thousand

fathers and failures an orphan so I'm one of many fathers of it I've always

thought the personal computer was invented by Wes Clark back in 1962 but I

got interested in the 60s in the whole notion of the computer being something

other than a vehicle but being more like an amplifier the way paper and other

media amplify us and so I just started thinking about what would it be like to

have something not even on a desktop but

intimate something you could take with you and maybe even made out of fur or

something but something that would be friendly in a way that computing

machinery wasn't back then people who are managing the use of computer

technology in large businesses or large government agencies often find there's a

resistance to the technology and there is a barrier to accepting new ways of

working is there a difference between the way people respond to Macintosh

versus other computers such as ms-dos we certainly think that there is and the

response and the change in market share and so forth over the last few years

would would lead us to believe that there's a much greater appeal in using

the Macintosh style of interface the Mac

has two things that it tries to do one is it tries to meet people where they

are and not demand any special knowledge of them to get started because of course

you don't need special knowledge on a computer with a well designed user

interface you should be able to start from where you are things that are familiar operations that you can do

instantly so the Macintosh starts you off doing what people actually do with a

Natchitoches and then what it tries to do is to spiral you upward so that you

can immediately start doing things but the sort of an inner goal of the Mac is

to help expand people's horizons giving them new ways to think about things and

to get them to perfect skills that they didn't have before so I think those two

things of going with the person as they are and then hoping to elevate the way

they think about the world are the essence of the success the study on

workforce 2000 which was done by the Hudson Institute spends a lot of time

talking about the changing nature of work and the workforce and the need that

people today will will have to adapt learn new skills and take on new jobs as

we move toward the 21st century is there anything in the design of the Macintosh

that can help I think the Mac deals with it in a

number of ways the Mac is much easier to learn than other systems and so the

ability of people to first get on the

Mac in the first place and do things but second to go to every couple of years to

a completely new round of powerful software without an enormous penalty and

retraining is one of the largest factors

in the in the Mac success when we look at change moving towards the 21st

century are the different perspectives when you look at it from the management side or from the workers side oh yes I

think that the again you know huge

generalization but I think that many American workers would like their high

school and training to be a little bit like a vaccination once you've done it you don't have to do it again

and that it's very often the case when workers get displaced from jobs they

have a very hard time going to new ones there's there's not a large tradition of

full life learning in our society

management I think tends to be a little

bit component-based when it thinks about people I need three draftsman over here

I need two of these over there and the

enormous training industry that's been set up now it tries to mediate between

these two and so I think finding ways to

help people see themselves as learners and one of the best ways to do that I

think is to fool them is to get them to

do a new skill before they realize they've actually learned something the

Mac has that property that before you know it you're actually doing something

then at some point you realize oh wait a minute I'm using a computer here what

happened you've said that Macintosh is fun I think some people may have

problems with that what is the practical value of a computer that's fun I think

that the practical value of having a

device that's fun is that you learn faster on it Richard Wurman says

learning is just remembering what you're interested in and so if you can get

people interested in something then the learning will happen a lot faster the

reason I think fun is important is because fun expands people's awareness

they're much more interested they're more likely to see more possibilities and they try more things the experience

that we've had with the Macintosh is that the number of applications people

actually use on the Macintosh is about four or five times the number that they

use on the ms-dos environment and part

of the reason is that the once people have used a couple of Macintosh

applications they know that about 70% of what they've learned already will be

immediately applicable in the new unknown application so people will not

even open the man I think people start out and get into

the Macintosh because of the fun they have but what keeps them going is a

sense of achievement a sense that they can accomplish something that they're

interested in doing yeah I I agree because I I think that a really you know

a pretty face nice user interface isn't enough that there has to be an enormous

amount of function behind it and although the Apple doesn't emphasize

that we have the most powerful processors that are on desktop computers today they deliver a lot of function but

the the by the same coin the function is absolutely irrelevant if people can't

get to it so it's really it's really a

balanced situation where you have to have ease of use but you also have to

have power that you're getting to so it's like just having automatic

transmissions and power steering and kind of things that make an automobile

easy to use you still have to have an engine and wheels and the gas tank and

so forth I think you can be extremely left brained and quantitative about

something like the Macintosh because the the fact is that people are more

productive on it by any standards that people care to come up with the fact

that it's fun and so forth people could think of as being value-added the fact

that it takes many weeks less training time is simply one way of paying for the

computer in the first place there is a lot of emphasis on benchmarking

computers and finding out how fast they can do certain processes I don't think

there's enough benchmarking of the entire system and the system involves

the person and the computer it's how fast you can work with the computer how

fast you can put your ideas into the computer as well as how fast the

computer can process it it's how fast you can decode what the computer tells

you so I think the benchmarking ought to involve looking at both the user and the

computer and measuring that right absolutely I agree I like the idea of

system-wide benchmarking and I think one of the things that I have shifted over

the years has been a shift from a concern for response time from the

mainframe to now a sort of a horsepower race how many MIPS do you have on the

desktop and I think the real concern though is what is your access to

resources both in the sense of what can

be on your your local hard disk but evermore what is your access to

resources all over the world that you can get to by networking and that access

question is the the heart of thinking about a computer as being a user

interface plus function yeah this puts more emphasis on interface well I think

it's that the Mac transcends just the

act of computing it actually gives you an environment in which you feel safe

which you are interested in things and at one level it's simply because it

appeals to the kinesthetic domain which most technology doesn't even contact so

in the Macintosh you can actually reach into the Machine and touch the objects

that are in there and move them around and so you you are in Sirte into the

world in a way you aren't and other in other systems and that if you consider

the total cost of getting a computer as

being more than what the box costs but the total cost over the life of having

it and what it means to do things with it then the Mac is the best bargain on

this earth and computers as the service sector becomes a more important element

of our economy management in industry and in government are looking not only

at productivity issues but also quality issues productivity says more more more

quality says better better better are these two in conflict or do they support

each other just think of sort of quality productivity and fun all actually go

together but I think for people to get sensitive to quality you have to be able

to allow them to experiment with it and so I think this notion of expansion of

awareness is the most important one and the other one is trust and I believe in

a funny kind of way that the computer revolution is going to expand that

because you're much more an autonomous being on a computer than you are when

you're hooked into a typical organization you're able to do more

yourself you trust yourself more and I think you are more trusted and I think

that and being inequality rich

environment can make a person more sensitive to qualitative things remember

we're in a we're in a place where so many forces in our society a

quantitative they're all bottom line things you have to get this done soon

and now we're asking people to sit down and make qualitative judgments about

things but make sure you get done quickly as well and I think that's the

hard one so we know as we plan out the rest of the century that there going to be tremendous changes at work and the

nature of workers and the workforce what can we look for from technology and what

should we look for from other sources well I think I always look first to the

human and think that we should change the awareness the kinds of things that

humans are aware of first the technology can be the amplifier of

that and to some extent it can be a catalyst and a reason for the change I

think that we will see a very large shift in the next ten years to a

pervasively networked society we'll see

a shift in friendly user interfaces from

the tool based kinds of interfaces that the Mac has made famous to a combination

of tool based and agent based interfaces where we will have in semi intelligent

computer processes taking on some of our goals structure going out and finding

things for us to go around and make sure that transactions we're trying to have

executed are going to happen for doing sign-off that happens in a dozen

different places in the world an agent will go along with a document to try and

get each of the people to to do the sign-off it will try and and organize

and bring together our relationship with the computer is gonna be changed the

computer is gonna jump off the desk into our laps you know it's going to be a change from

a desktop personal computer to an

intimate computer in other words we'll start using computer the way we use paper these computers that we carry

around with us but will will be linked into this network using cellular technology

anything that we deal with on the computer can be criticized we can be

skeptical about those models we can question we can call up other opinions

of it in the in the workplace I think

it's going to lead to a much more curious society I think that the hardest

thing for people to do is often is to open up the encyclopedia once they've

got it open they will read more than the article they are looking for so I think

perhaps the biggest change in the computer are all the implications of a

computer of computers that have no on/off switches all of these things

together are going to constitute an enormous set of changes for

organizations to deal with but as always the strongest weapon in exploring these

new areas is the one between our ears providing us loaded