Alan Kay Preparation Interview for at XT 20 Conference

i got asked to

give a talk at xd 20 because i was

of the researchers and leader of a research

arpa and xerox park combined research

community in the 60s and the 70s that

invented many of the technologies

are in use today including the ones that we're using

right now these include personal

computing the graphical user interface ethernet

the internet laser printing client

server computing and a host of other ones and

so this was not just a series of inventions but

creation of several

uh really large industries that have

by according to the wall street journal have

returned about 45 trillion to the world

and the four largest

uh capital net worth companies in america

all use are based on these technologies

so besides being good ideas besides being

something that can boost human intellect

and deal with much more complicated

situations it also has been

a tremendous commercial success

far beyond normal r

d efforts so one point that's of interest i think to people

is that despite this no country

or company or university

fund such an effort however i just read in

the uk is going to

try and set up a kind of an arpa

modeled structure and it'll be interesting

to see how well this works the combined

computing research at xerox park

was only about 15 billion 15 million

pounds a year if that

and i saw in the guardian that the proposed

outlays perhaps uh 800

of those millions of pounds so there's

plenty of money there the key is can you get the

right people and you can you set up something

that allows the

researchers and the right researchers to

do the kind of stuff that normally was only done when

they were in the middle of a war

that's the second point is that

there have been many such efforts successful efforts

like arpa and xerox park in the past

especially in the u.s and the

cold war and then back in world war ii and the particular

way of going about it actually traces back to the combined

joint work of the uk

and the us in developing radar

for world war ii there's a direct link

in the methodologies used back then

to an extent in projects

that were not so directly involved like bletchley park

over here and los alamos

and the atomic bomb effort

so i think what will be of interest to the

people who go to this conference will likely be

the idea first that it really can be done

and it has been done more than once

that most uh

normal regular people are quite against

taking what seems to be a huge risk

but in fact the payoff from these

which have actually been only a few uh 100 million

pounds or so has been in the trillions

so if you count up all the zeros the return on

ot fifteen percent but more like twenty thousand

percent so it's actually would make good business

sense for people to take these kinds of risks

but that isn't the way uh business people think

and so this is i think a really interesting

area to explore and that's what i will at least open the door

to in my