Alan Kay at Pacific Northwest Bell Technology Forum

as I heard some of the talks this morning I sort of changed a little bit

around what I was what I was going to say I decided that a good theme for this

talk would be from one clip that has had

a lot to do with the designs I've done over the last 25 years

McLuhan in the 60s said I don't know who discovered water but it wasn't a fish

and we can even imagine the fish having philosophical discussions about their

world without ever realizing that they're embedded in the context that

they can't see and I think a lot of what is going on both generally and within

your companies can take some some

inspiration from that there are secondary things that come out of that

one of my favorites fasces is the Olly

I'm as smart as you are fallacy and that's off and most ways that's never

the never the problem and it's I think it's as we talked about in the next few

minutes that the NIH is not a good way of describing what the problem is I

think that is a factor and we see it but the biggest problem is I would call

hyper rationalism in American business and in particularly in American technology we really think that we can

sit down and rationally lay out problems

and solve them by analysis favorite joke

at Xerox PARC where I was for a decade in the 70s was when we called the

Mexican airlines joke and this joke a

friend of mine was had to go from Mexico

City down to the Yucatan Peninsula got to the airport and saw the plane was

incredibly old dc-3 with paint peeling

off and oil dripping out of the engines and with some trepidation he walked

inside the plane looked in the cockpit and saw that half the instruments

weren't even in the in the instrument panel like they're just wires hanging out and the ones that

were there twisted about at crazy angles he thought to himself oh no I'm gonna

die on this trip but he had to go so he

got on the plane and they had a scary takeoff and dodging mountains lumbering

along down to the Yucatan Peninsula he decided he would poke his head back in

the cockpit and see how the pilot was doing so he stuck his head in there and

then noticed that on the instrument panel that every needle was pointing

straight up in other words this pilot

had solved the user-interface problem that was the first one you ever want to solve and that is how can I tell when

everything is all right

so any instrument that hadn't didn't conformed to this had been simply ripped

out the ones that had needles have been

twisted around so that up meant okay now

our society is incredibly interested in designing the perfect instrument to fit

in the instrument panel we will tell you exactly how low your oil pressure is but

in our design of the cockpit we will not give you any good way of knowing that

your oil pressure is low at all if you happen to look over there you will see

that it is incredibly low but out of the entire field of view we won't provide

any way to let you know that something is going on and that is the difference

between our hyper-rational left-brain culture and a much less rational but

much more field oriented visual culture such as we find in Latin America and

we've gotten to the point now where we have to consider much more than the sort

of Calvinist traditions of our society to the next 20 years Whitehead

philosopher Alfred North Whitehead pointed out that the great invention of

the 19th century was invention itself and he backed that up by showing that

the going to the British Patent Office and showing that the incredible rise in

the number of patent submissions factors

of 10 many factors of 10 more in the 19th century than in the 18th century

and what was even more important to whitehead were two other things one is

that the number of crackpot inventions that were under consideration for

patents or had gotten them was enormous they might think well gee why would he

care about that well that to him meant that almost everybody was inventing

didn't matter where they're a good inventor a bad inventor invention was something that you did in the 19th

century know something you didn't do in the centuries before if you urge a

random the other thing was is that even though

the number of crackpot inventions was enormous the number of good inventions

was also much higher before in history

happen was something very much like a something that I my analogy to that is I

had been interested in Renaissance painting for many years and looked

forward to this my first trip to Italy which I took some 25 years ago or so and

of course I went immediately to Florence and I went immediately to the Uffizi

gallery in Florence and I started going through the Uffizi gallery and I saw a

lot of things I was was I saw an

incredible number of meat paintings came

out of that tour with the realization and everybody physically have been the

part of what the Renaissance was about is all of a sudden they needed to had an

enormous amount of wall space and a new

wall space in it who could actually physically manipulate a brush had been

taught the techniques of under painting and drape painting and all of those

things and in fact the percentage of really great stuff in the Uffizi gallery

was much more like we'd expect from looking at something today but not what

we were led to believe from thinking reading about Renaissance art because they never show the media mediocre stuff

in the books the only show of the great masters and you get very little sense of

what was actually going on back there well I think that we're in a very

similar situation and I think that a lot

of what programming today is is very similar to that I think that if you by

and large look at programming as it has gone over the last 25 years you find

something very much like the new fitzy gallery is that anybody who can type in

a key punch over the years has can't has

and has learned how to program and has written programs what we have is this

enormous variety of ways of doing things some of them

existing genre but some of them in just

random ways or I'm as smart as you are ways they're not going to help and I

think that one way of looking at this is to go back to McLuhan statement and try

and understand what it actually means what it means is that any rational plan

that we make today is probably wrong

because the history the 20th century I

told you about the 19th century out of 20th century McLuhan I think came up

with a great sentence he said the 20th century is a century in which change

changed so what our whole notion of what

it actually means and what what that actually implies I think is critical in

doing software design basically I'll just make the blunt statement I don't believe that any software any

architecture that responds to current

day market needs is going to be a success I think it's going to be an unmitigated disaster because it is

actually tied to assumptions that we're making that says the future is going to

be like the past and that simply isn't true may have been true before all of

our schools in the United States are based on that idea it takes at least ten

ideas ten years to cycle any idea through a teacher's college that

assumption is is that that I'd all the ideas that are worth while teaching kids

are at least ten years old and nothing new has happened in the last ten years that's a fallacy so we're very much like

a situation in the beginning of this entry when the motion picture camera was

invented this is another McLuhan observation and it took 25 years before

DW Griffith figured out that you could move the camera

as all the people who made movies back then we're stage directors that thought

of the camera as being a person sitting in the audience in fact not a not just

in the audience but in the Royal position in the audience which is what

all scenery in the you know wonder how scenery is designed on stage it is

designed so that the King can have see everything in perfect perspective it

doesn't matter whether anybody else can or not so this idea of having the camera

there and having people slavishly imitate stage practices is something

that we do today so we're very much like people in the cathedral business during

the Romanesque period who suddenly had come up with an idea gee you know wouldn't it be great if we let some

light into these huge buildings what a

great idea and what we should what we need to do is figure out some way of

getting Windows without having the building fall down because the forint

unfortunately the roof is held up by the walls if we Pierce the walls too much

they can fall down to the wind can blow the thing over and what we're not doing

is saying our new vision of what change

is absolutely requires a different way

of doing our structuring so for instance

my big reaction this morning I'll tell you is when I heard people talking about new architectures and then using in the

same breath the word data it can't work

it just simply can't work data is too fragile to be put on a network the kind

of network that you're talking about so any kind of system that involves simply

integration and adaptation that retains the old concepts of data and procedure

without new ways of thinking about protection and new ways of thinking

about what those modules are simply won't work it simply won't and so what

what I heard this morning I'm going to sound the first order Theory's sounded

great and I think it's something that the telephone industry should have done

a long time ago because you had the leverage and the ability to do a long

time ago but simply trying to say to integrate things through network and

retaining all of the old things that you're going to try and integrate is simply painting over rust that will

eventually bring down the girders of the structure you're trying to build you

have to find a different way and what we're in the middle of one of these things that Coon and popper called

paradigm shifts and so what's and I

think the other thing you can't say is coat the two words that are bad here

once you say network is our data and code you have to go to something more

like saying gee if we're really going to have the kind of transparent virtual

system that we're talking about we have to have something that is much more like

a biological system than the kinds of fragile systems that we can build out of

balsa wood if you look at biological systems they work because each little

site module a tiniest module is its own miniature ocean every cell in our body

and we have a trillion cells is a miniature ocean it maintains and it

spends 90% of all of its energy simply maintaining its internal ocean against

all factors in the environment it only lets certain hormones in the cell what

the cell is therefore like being a liver cell or a kidney cell or something like

that is just the smallest part of what the cell actually does the big change here

in thinking about this in software is we have thought in the past of having a

software module spend 90% of its code or

maybe a hundred percent of its code executing the function for which it was

designed that's no longer be gonna be the case maybe 10% of the code is going

to do the function 90% of the code that's in that module is going to be

there to protect it from all the other modules and

and to be able to explain itself to you you're not going to find these modules

through a dictionary the modules are going to find you because what you're

going to do is say is you're going to say I need things that will do this if

you think of what it means to to do information retrieval you can find things by key word retrieval you can

find things by browsing but the easiest way of finding things is in a crowd here

I could say something that uses no keyword that people are familiar with

but if I gave a description and you understood the description then you could say I'm a match to that

description so these modules are going to respond to calls for help and just

like antibodies they're gonna come B opponents of the

things that you're putting together in other words these modules are going to act right part of what I want to talk

today is is some of the implications of that and I think that NIH not invented

here is not going to is gonna may be a problem for for modules but I think the

biggest problem is not with our code but with there is somebody else's ideas

because our industry has been marked or my industry the computer science

industry has been marked for the last 25 years by an enormous least stubborn

process of people not being able to move on from ideas that were thought up in

the 50s basically we are still writing code the way that it was done in the 50s we've gotten rid of the key punch in

most places and still find them in a few other places but in fact the way we

think about algorithms the way we think about machines and so forth hasn't

changed nothing so I'd make a blanket statement and say that good ideas won't

cut it you can't get by on good ideas you have to have some great ideas and

the reason is is that a good idea like a rational plan may be obsolete by the

time you implement it remember it takes more to implement systems and so if you

only have a 3-year idea you have just killed yourself you have to have 15-year

ideas and because you can't predict out to 15 years ahead you have to yeah that

can change it changed to model whatever

15 years from now now we're systems had better not have

anything to do with the current needs of your marketplace they better have

something to do with the idea that you're going to have to build complex structures that work over networks and

you better not have one single line in any of your descriptions that has

anything to say about what these things are going to how these things respond to

a particular market need today that's a way of polluting the whole design so

you're out after something more like biology you're saying I better not worry

about the organization the organisms I'm going to do I need something like DNA I

want to be able to build several million species out of the same stuff and I want

it I don't want to have to think ahead about what all of those species are going to be so I think the most

important thing most important analogies in this process are coming up with the

notion of what DNA is in a notion of what embryology is those are the two

most stable things in in the living

living systems now her oddest Herodotus knew this he

had this wonderful statement 2500 years ago that the only constant is change

itself the Greeks understood a lot of

this because they their change their world was undergoing the same kind of

upheavals probably the most traumatic event that ever happened to the Greeks

intellectually was the change from the

Pythagorean way of thinking to the thinking of Plato Plato and Aristotle it

wasn't all a good change for them but they were forced into it because the way

Pythagoras thought about things was that the world was completely rational and

could be rationalized you know we call

in mathematics things that are fractions rational numbers and that's because

rationalization means that you can measure them and you can form ratios of

them you can express things as ratios of other things and that was very important

to the Greeks for the kinds of things that they did and Pythagoras found out two very horrible things about the

universe which even the state of

Tennessee has not owned up to yet

one of the things he found out was that the certain triangles analyzed they just

couldn't believe that because you can draw the damn diagonal but if you take a

triangle it has to a side length of one

draw the diagonal then the diet length of the diagonal is a square root of two

and it's very easy it was very easy for the Greeks to show that the square root

of two is not a number that can be formed by any fraction there is no ratio

that expresses that that was like finding a crack in the universe to the

Greeks and in fact they never there mathematics could not recover from that

they were not able to go beyond and deal with what that actually meant so was

their worldview being able to measure things and Pythagoras did it again with

a more subtle thing which is the the

awful thing that if you if you hit play

the note C and you take its its second

harmonic which is a G make a note out of that and take its second harmonic which

is a D and take its second harmonic which is an a you can go spinning your

way through the harmonics of each of these notes as you go along getting all

the notes that fill up our scale and what they found out in 500 BC is that

that circle does not come back on itself now how could God have done that

and today every musician that plays a piano is forced to play in notes that

are purposely off-key in order to have 12 notes in an octave game string

players hate to play with piano players for that very reason because we are

inescapably forced into playing off-key because God did not see fit to make this

the 12th fret of to something that was Co measurable so the universe is not set

up the way we really would like it to be and every time we run into one of these

things there is a shock and every coil

now that brings me to thinking about how

do we invent things we predict the

future I think there are three main methods of inventing things the first

one is the brainstorming method that's where you get a bunch of people in the room and you you basically shove

ingredients together Jam ingredients together and you try and give names to

the resulting messes some of the messes you can paint over and then go out and

sell that's how the boombox was invented you take every obnoxious thing in a 12

year olds room watt it together and you

have something you can sell as a product and most businesses are much more

rational in that they have a goal-oriented strategy which has said find a need and fill it that's what I

was hearing this morning there are needs and we're out trying to fill them that's what most people do that's what

marketing people do when they try and predict things and the problem with that

is that has failed to predict or to deal with any of the great technological

inventions of the 20th century so the great technological inventions of the

20th century had nothing to do with either of these two processes so the

third way which I think is the powerful way is invent something that creates a

need only it can fill

okay lots of famous examples of this I have I have a morgue file that's about a

foot thick I collected these because the companies hate to believe in these ideas

because the the process of in that kind of invention is non rational but a good

example is was folklore and written in a

book by a former Xerox executive by the name of John guess our who's with the company from almost the very beginning

in his book was called my years with Xerox the billions nobody wanted the

central story is that after they had perfected the 914 copier which some of

you may remember the first plain paper copier in 1956 they took it to IBM

because they didn't have enough money to build factories to make this thing so

they said to IBM here take this build factories go out and sell it we just

want a small royalty we'd like to see this out in the world and IBM did what

most companies do when they don't know what to do and that as they went out and hired a consulting firm now Mike Hammer

has a wonderful definition of a consultant he says a consultant is a person who knows a hundred ways to make

love but doesn't have a girlfriend

like like insulting jokes there's another one is the difference between

the consulting firm and a Boy Scout Troop is that the Boy Scout Troop has adult leadership anyway

the consulting firm they hired was Arthur D little and Arthur T little spent 18 months coming back with a

report this that conclusively proving that there was no market for plain paper copying it was based on two major things

they went out and there there was no market demand for it people didn't do

much copying and it was more than ten

times as expensive as Mamiya graphing both of those things they thought just

how could it possibly work nixed at IBM came back and said no this enraged the

Haloid corporation people to such an extent that they went out and raised the

money for their first factory using their life insurance as security and that was about two hundred billion

dollars ago that story and there are many of them the airlines after will I

mean the railroads after World War one conclusively proved that railroad

transportation would always be cheaper than airline transportation you know

what they were exactly right exactly right the problem was is that they are

now almost non-existent they were so right they aren't around anymore

now's the problem with being right because rightness as we'll see as I go

go into the sort of the main body of this talk has nothing to do with the

perfection of your logic people were incredibly right when they're working on

alchemy in the Middle Ages but they were in a context where they didn't realize

that you had to put energy into any transaction with matter and so they

could not come out they were quite right and believing that you could transmute lead into gold you can absolutely do it

it's been done but you can't do it the way they were doing it because they were

in a water that they couldn't see and the water that prevented them from

seeing what the true pathways were so I believe that the you know the message of

this talk is that logic is a weak method and that humanity has made its way

from hundreds of thousands of years ago primarily by choosing powerful context

in which to think we always think weekly we usually think logically even

primitive people's think logically but their contexts are such that their

results don't help them very much and so the big thing is not whether you

can substantiate something with the chain of logic but whether you've got a context that's going to work for you now

another example of a great opportunity this is my vote for the first personal

computer this slide was taken in 1962 so

this slide is 25 years old this is a machine built at Lincoln labs in

Laboratory of MIT and is built for

biomedical technicians the had everything that we associate with

personal computers today and for those of you who are familiar with Digital

Equipment Corporation machines those things that look like deck tapes were

actually originally invented for this machine and they held not files but the

pages of the virtual memory this first personal computer had so this is a

machine and about 2,000 of these were built in the 60s mostly used by

biomedical technicians who couldn't afford programmers didn't want to wait for the mainframe and remarkably almost

900 of these are still does the

longest-standing computer architecture the reason is it was designed for

hooking up to things like nerve cells

and nerve cells haven't sped up in the last 25 years this machine was

programmable by its and users the end users like the machine and they just saw

no reason for throwing it away so there are quite a few of them still around and

praise them lots of places when I give talks I show this slide and people come

up to me after and say yep I got one - really great now the lesson from this is

that Dec Digital Equipment Corporation also came out of Lincoln labs in the

early 60s that's where they came from when they saw this machine they said to

themselves oh boy what a great way of building a small mainframe computer but

people aren't used to display so we'll take that off and make it an option and

people don't know what virtual memories are so we'll we'll take those pages off and I've got it we'll put files on those

tapes and we'll call them Dec tapes so a deck was able to invent from saying this

machine in 1962 was the mini computer a great step backwards dec missed what

what the actual future of this was but West Clark who invented this

machine saw it all he understood what

what what it meant to have this and in fact part of the design in this machine

was it was supposed to be low enough so you could see over it the idea of the

computer is an intimidating box that loomed over you he purposely designed

the case low like this so it would seem friendly also at Lincoln labs ivan

sutherland invented the first interactive graphics system in 1962 and

a my my deal in showing these old old

tapes is promised never to show you something that you can go out and buy so

i'm going to show you this graphics system from 1962 and see what you think

about sketchpad

it's done on a computer quite a bit larger than this room in fact the last

computer in the US that had its own roof

this is 1960 of 1962 this is the first movie the iben was the one who invented

the rubber band technique so you have seen that before but now look he points

at the edges here and says the sketchpad I want you to make those all mutually

perpendicular sketchpad just figured out how to do that

get pads the first system to ever have a window so in this first graphic system

he's drawing on a virtual sheet of paper 1/3 of a mile on a side again why is it

called sketch pad well you can just draw in and then give it a couple of rules and sketch pad figures out there the

rule was make it parallel and perpendicular here the rule is collinearity so the little dashes he's

laid down are being positioned exactly on the guidelines below so sketch pad is

not just the first interactive graphics program it is also the first non

procedural programming system and its ability at problem-solving goes far

beyond any schedule today can handle complex nonlinear problems to draw in a

in a bridge on it without it ever knowing about bridges it could automatically calculate the stresses and

strains you could draw an electric circuit and simply by giving the rules for omoi and what a battery was again

here you see he wants to make a rivet he just catches in uses that as the Center

for the arc and then to finalize the

drawing he again points at it again he's going to use this rule of making these

guys mutually perpendicular that will drag the center guy which will drag the

top guy which will give you a perfect rivet he could have constrained those to

be the side lengths he could have constrained those to be dependent on

something else

so we have to wonder when we look at this thinking of what was in Ivan

Sutherlands mind when he what he did this

and here's another idea which still according to one of the talks this

morning still hasn't made it in the door of this company here's an instance of

that rivet he was working on a master

drawing and see each of the instances can be dynamically scale rotate

it's gonna last well idea what this is this first system which it was discovered that the light pen was a very

bad input device the book runs out of your hand in about 20 seconds in spite

of that it's been the most reinvented bad piece of technology in the last 25

years it's been reinvented about 90 times so here are other instances now

you might wonder why is the display jumping around well he didn't really have been in the cute air defense

computer I hear what he's doing is saying I don't like those cross pieces so he goes back to the master drawing

makes them transparent and lo and behold we see into felt that change dynamically

let's get it also the first

object-oriented software system 25 years ago it had dynamic inheritance and all

the things that people are still wondering whether it's a good idea today

and in fact it's one of the best ideas anybody ever thought up and it certainly

is the best idea that most people have never adopt it is the way you build a

Gothic cathedral and here he's showing that anything that you make any

conglomerate conglomerate that you may be a master

well that was sketchpad I'd like to tell you where you can buy a system this good

and once they asked Ivan Sutherland you

know 10 or 15 years ago I said Ivan how could you possibly have done the world's

first interactive graphic system the first non procedural programming system

and the first object-oriented software system all in the same year he said well

I didn't know it was hard and in fact

one of the things that helped him out was that the display wasn't very good he

said when he looked at the display he said boy this thing isn't it is not going to be as good good as paper what

else can it do this is the big

difference between Ivan and almost everybody else is that I even asked that

question before 25 years around DW Griffith and asked that question what

can the cam what else can the camera do 25 years after movie started but Ivan

asked this question right at the beginning and that is the major question

you have to ask what else can it do whenever you're going into a paradigm change because if all you want to do is

your old stuff on it the architecture you're going to come up with it's not going to handle the stuff when you

finally figure out what else that can do you got to ask what else can the to the early on and get some sort of

philosophical way of thinking about it here's another wild man Douglas

Engelbart in the mid-60s and Doug was

the guy who invented the mouse and the black-and-white display and was the

first person to implement hypertext hypertext is something where people are

talking about today but in fact it was thought up in 1945 wonderful article in

Atlantic Monthly by President Roosevelt science advisor Vannevar Bush talked

about a machine called the Memex which would be the size of a desk would

have the optical storage of the contents of a small town library would have

multiple screens pointing devices ways of laying your own information trails

through it and he thought that would be possible over the next

twenty-five years and a number of people read that in the 50s including Engelbart

and decided to try an angle bar did

something else sorry these slides are backwards my fault

Engelbart did something else that was so

almost obscene he actually went into the offices and looked at how people did

things in their offices he studied his users something that we don't do very

much of today one of the things he discovered was that people wouldn't sit

hunched over their desks like they've been taught through 16 years of school

right because that's one of the major processes in American education is to

teach kids how to hunched over their desks and be quiet and he discovered

that even after 16 years all right

dad the people hadn't learned it very well instead they go scooting around in

their office they put their feet up in the desk they zoom their chair over to the blackboard and make marks on it so

Engelbart said well why the heck should we make people hunched over their desk to use their computer isn't it more

important than that so one of his earliest systems had a

laughs board that hooked onto your chair so that whatever you were doing in your

office you always had your computer navigation stuff with you as though it

were important and in fact so let's take

a look at this is a demonstration of

angle bar system 20 years ago

one of the reasons it's fun to show all this old stuff is that these guys in the

60s had incredibly pure vision [Music]

[Music]

[Music]

[Music]

I don't want his terminals right now so I have to ask for something to say about

it so we put a marker tracking spot that he controls so he's sitting in the park

looking at this text and he can point to it that we've carefully reserved for me

the right to control an operator on this so my bug is not powerful in yours

[Music]

in case you having something happen

collaboration here so we can go on into

information retrieval flying in looking at the same display

and that'd be very handy to work we could talk to each other point and maybe later I could hand you the chalk on the

stock for that saying here you control it and let's say this mode now and had

another feature that hardware-wise is available for display we have I'd like

to see you I'm working on it so before I can do that

I see it now computer do the automatic

switching they bring in a camera yes

this feeling was immensely intuitive beyond belief because he not only

anticipated most of what we think of as the personal computer revolution today

he went beyond it in that he realized that people are not natural born Hermits

that we're at communications junkies and that whatever computing meant to oneself

was something that was going to have to be shared intimately and so in their

first design is another one of these things incremental development balderdash it's not the way the good

stuff is done good stuff is done in huge cosmic romantic images and there's

nothing incremental about it at all Engelbart said oh yes of course I have

to work well I should be able to point

if they're going to talk points and move

things around conference twenty five or

six people in all different locations in the country each person's little cursor

would have their initials on it so as they we're talking and moving around you

could say oh this is this person pointing over here and moving this stuff so they understood it as a communal

blackboard a way of sharing a database intimately and of course you want to be

able to see the person now I don't want to make you feel bad but angle Bart

broke his heart in the early 70s going around to

telephone companies trying to get them to buy off on this vision couldn't see

it at all but this is what you want isn't it

that's what you're talking about that because more than what you're talking

about because it says yes you have to have face-to-face communication you have

to have all of these just voice files it's being able to have essentially is

embittered now though lately people

giving this talk recognition many people

from the 60s who had the pure vision and

money together the hard thing about innovation is getting anybody to

recognize it when it's done because if

it doesn't for rational scheme to even

see

personal computer I did it's brown 1968

and they'd gotten a little smaller by then and this is a desktop special kinda

like steel it's a weight about 175

pounds it had to distinguish a character

it first was it was an incredibly good coffee warmer now these little black

packages that hold the silicon Macintosh or an IBM PC have about 40 or 50 of them

that constitute the computer back then

you could get maybe eight gates on a chip and so this machine had about 700

of them crammed into this space and had a fan that was like in seven the other

thing it was in Israel positively

supposed to the people a little bit

moist and fuzzy down inside very much

the way people react to APL today and I

was disgusted I designed the programming language just one of the first

object-oriented programming languages very powerful simulation graphics the

sorry to close out it had multiple

windowing lots of different ideas but I finally realized that the big flaw in

the design was McLean's statement I

don't know who discovered water but it wasn't a fish I was a graduate student

and the puberty right of being a graduate student is be able to learn a

stupid system that has 500 illogical commands in the show that you can do

something with it every graduate student goes through that rite of passage and by

the time you've gone through it you've become entirely incapable of designing a

decent user interface because you've

adopted the idea that well what a user should do is simply remember everything

that's efficient you can

of control keys and double bucking control keys for every different command

and that's all you actually need doesn't

work and the revelation came to me at

night when I first got its work with

logo in bridge school in Lexington mass and it was a there's a revelation to

realize that something that had formerly been done in what we used to call the Glass House which is the air condition

that you could actually extend a substantial part of what computing was

all the way down into the world of the child and that was when my head did a

huge I went of IBM used to think of IBM

is railroad laying its own track

deciding its own destinations making up the timetable if you wanted to go anywhere he had to go on IBM schedule do

whenever you want it I thought of angle Bart stuff as being and I thought and

when I did this previous machine I thought very much of it as being a vehicle when I saw a pampered stuff I

thought oh no this stuff is not a vehicle it's much more important than that medium this is like paper and

pencil it's not something we would hold from children until they're age 18

that's something we wanted children to start using from the day that they are born there's another system done around

1968 by some people at RAND Corporation

Rand had a bunch of economists that they

tried to build computing systems for the

Economist I said look we like everything that you're doing first but none of us

can type can't you do some we're used to writing on notepads can't you do

something about that so it's already in 1964 here's what they did

it's called graphical input language

this movie is from around 1968 flips

the system and a new way of interacting

with the computer there was much more natural much more like with people had already been used

to doing

[Music]

no keyboard at all slow arrow recognizes

he wants a box and makes one now it's recognizing his handwriting the printing

in the box is being used as commentary only in this case the box is slightly

too large a change in size

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I noticed that this is the end here he

sees it he hesitates we can just then

make the change without any command modes whatsoever this system changed my

life when I saw that I felt I got a chance to use it for a half an hour

sinking my fingers right through the glass of the display and touching the

structures underneath you notice that the system is analogic no menus you

never are looking away from where you're working and every command resembles the

thing that you wanted to do you want a box you draw a box want a character you

draw a character you want to get rid of something you scrub it out it resembles

the thing that you're trying attention

go away from where you're working credible system still one of the most

intimate systems ever designed I used to show this movie to my group at Xerox

PARC every three months so we wouldn't forget what we were trying to do this again was

done on a monster system the size of this room I should mention that both

sketchpad and system were his room sized

computers but in fact each of those computers was slightly less 512k Mac so

what we're seeing here is not we're seeing stuff done by single people these

but what we're seeing stuff is stuff that could be implemented on the micro computers of today and simply hasn't

been because the level of thinking about this stuff most people who implement on

microcomputers have no sense of that this stuff was ever done maybe Newton

said I was able to see as far as I could see because I stood on the shoulder of

giants it's because of this refrain I'm

as smart as you are but a relevant

important thing is we don't start from these ideas to go back and be smart as

Ivan is and that's hard to do we need to

start from ask ourselves what what has

changed in the last 20 years know the

1868 was a little one inch square flat

screen display developed at the University of Illinois when we saw that

we realized that the destiny and we're able to calculate out when the destiny

was going to happen Gordon more Intel for a 1965 that

predicted where silicon was going to go for the next 30 years he's only been off by about 4% over

those 20 so anybody who wants to know what's

going to happen in the next thing you simply go to that 19 paper and read it

you will find out why do you have a

flying a plane designed by an engineer

don't ever design in a fly by an artist

the big difference between the two you may enjoy sitting in the ground but you

may have some worries about how it might actually get up again Gordon Moore Dec

12 con was going to go by seeing this display we said okay sometime in the

1980s there are going to be millions of these what would it be like if everybody

had one could anybody and the lights

there's no hardly anybody could use these machines and so we said well the

real problem is and this thing as a medium pencil for even for things like

portability means you can close to 0.5

herniation per block is not portability

anything that forces you to decide whether you should take it along is not

portable we like the this metaphor when thinking

about children we said what would it be like for than the one pencil and all the

children had the time share it what would it be like for the classroom in

the school where all the pencils were and the kids could only go there for two hours a week in fact thought so we

decided since we couldn't understand how to design for adults very well so what

we would do is think about this lap

Dynabook we called it in the context of children and say that anything that

calls itself a personal computer has to be accessible to children or the whole

point is so this machine was built at Park in the

this is the 4 workstations first

bitmapped about is actually is a

Macintosh money to create the 1980s 10

years ahead of time we said this is what we want to do and

we eventually built 2,000 people all

over Xerox have these the ethernet was invented the same year and so was the

page a second laser this was concept no

are you at all evolutionary things almost never work

out this is done okay this is what it's

going to be like in the 1980s let's build it now this is as small as we could build those in your lap that was

as small as we could build it but it had all of the functional care that's great

had only bits because liquid crystal

display of the 19 a nobody

direct think so silly as to only because

we're simulating a display of the future why people do it with honor off dots

today I have no idea I think they're just slavish ly editor and the design

here was saying we don't want to have to undergoing to do so the first thing we

wanted to get rid of is any responsibility for what's what the fonts

are we didn't want to put the funds and wrong because the message of a bitmap is

you can have a kind of or any kind of display that you want let's make it

programmable the first font editor a page of text on that display we're

working with the idea they said hey you know hey have our composition our first

drafts of our time

because it misses the point you know this looks too looks too set in stone to

chiseled and bronzed so one of the kids put in his own handwriting so I'd rather

have my handwriting front first - fine

now I don't mean it yet and of course

you can not only do crisp computer graphics but you can also do sketching

sketching is tremendously important because up till the bitmap display and

these techniques design on computer and

I daresay very few people design on your computers the reason is is that because

of even when you have computer graphics it's usually too crisp and solidifies

you into a point of view before you want it done by making messes and then trying

to pull out order from the mess so we're

very interested and then of course we

knew about windows but one of the things you can do with a bitmap display that

occurred to me in the shower one day was that you could act as though the windows

were overlapping and that would be terrific magnify the effective area of

the screen and also give you something that was like the metaphor of dynamic

paper on a desk so that idea was thought up in these stuff so this this slide is

twelve years old this is the kind of interface of people now Mac that's an

apple that the letters IBM for

now important thing to think about is

this is something I heard in the talk

this morning that access isn't enough one of the 80% so it's going to be done

is going to be end-user I think not just

that end-users were going to make decisions but that end-users were going

to the 80% of programming those being

done I fact I think the figure two

percent one hundred percent in a few years maybe two percent will be special

authors but in fact the important thing about change is you can't anticipate and

therefore you build in rigid rules into your system it somehow has to be

sculpted we designed language calls

completely object-oriented and it has

okay all that word visitor otta morning

Jules it has inheritance it has share

ability and in fact the early version simply with children could actually use

it as an authoring language so not only were they accessing tools what their app

to make things if you think about this

in relationship media we don't think

people are literate if all they can do is read so that means all I can do is

consume material done by others we say people should be able to write at least

a two page memo page essay is a

rhetorical tool you can change somebody's mind with it you can clarify

something the equivalent of that is to ask what can you do in a couple of pages

with your computer system

here's answer to that

so here's a system that's quite

recognizable to us today it's like Mac

so it's an object-oriented graphics system it has a menu of commands down at

the bottom back window in the middle here's the color palette off the screen

this size move it the only thing interesting is it

this is not bought in the store this movie 1975 12 years old application the

application was designed and implemented

by a twelve-year-old girl after just three months programming and small talk

the size of the code to do the entire application was 50 lines this is a one

pager

these professors are horrified because they'd be signing this for their

sophomores and juniors one of the things

let's think about and one of the ways of

in your new architecture is not just whether you can integrate things and not

just whether you can have modules but if you don't have a size reduction in the

size of your code of at least a factor of 10 and a reduction in the complexity

of your code by a factor of a high your run run here's the system done by a

15 year old who was interested in ham radio feely sophisticated he has a

little pop-up menu he uses there for often you open and closed dot he has a

menu of components down there it's also

done after about programming and small talk it's an 80 line piece of code about

a page and re rotated my programs done

because before at a PhD has been awarded

and it's good so I figure we were making

some progress

final question we should ask is well how

much of a medium is this it is really

all of human existence so I got from the

woman who is my accountant

about a year and a half ago this is her

daughter 22 months old two months shy of

her second birthday she world without it

was not intosh 'as both of her parents

work at home her parents when I found

out the little girl was interested in computers like to which she rejected she

wanted what her parents had because that was part of her environment and all I

don't believe in user surveys I did one

with this young user and I discovered she vastly preferred PCs with installed

hard disks

treat it surprises can use the mouse

without looking at it but in fact everybody can and I've never seen

anybody this young do this but it didn't amaze me too much that she was able to

pick out visible macpaint here and

change parameters and so forth so I saw

this I was intrigued but I wasn't overwhelmed until I saw what she to get

a new sheet of hits to close a box in

the windows saves her all uses the

pulldown to get a new one and she's off and running again and we discovered that

after this we took many many hours of video tape of her using a variety of

applications and we discovered she was 70% literate in the Macintosh generic

commands so she could even start up in an application like PageMaker

good here make some marks print it save

it get another one and so forth so she could handle she was basically 70%

literate in what we call the Macintosh user interface language at age 22 months

and in fact we discovered that the mouse which is the size of a brick for her

Kazak to use at that age than a pencil

she could do things with it she couldn't do because it was had enough mass to be

stable for so there's one answer to the question the access so you get with a

well-designed user interface all the way down

and that's incredibly important because it's only which is gonna take place we

learn things from birth remember technology all that stuff you

were born right we don't think of

watches as being technology some of us think of television like television but

many of us in the room think of television as part of the environment and our reactions to it have to do with

whether it's a round I burned it as a

child or whether it was something that was thrust upon us later on which

technology opposes the technology so is

maybe just quick so I think I'm out of my time usually in this talk I go

through what the the psychological reasons what we have goals that make

user interface designs like this work the enough perhaps too much in the

beginning of the thing and so let me finish off with another user interface

joke and this one is a Winston Churchill joke and like all Winston Churchill

jokes it has to do he's at a party after a certain number of whiskey's and like I

should tell you to Churchill jokes because the both of them apply the first

one is he's had many whiskey's it's a very late at night very early in the

morning and they he's sort of peering

out Lee around the woman and the Duchess comes over to him and says mr. Churchill

you are disgustingly drunk and he looks at her and says Anne you madam are

incredibly ugly but in the morning I will be

indisputably sober so this is one way of

one way of dealing with your evaluating your information systems and see what

they look like in the morning the second Churchill joke is ready the hostess of

the party comes over to him and says mr. Churchill I'm so distraught I just saw

over here steal one of my silver salt shakers what am I to do and Churchill

thought for a minute and stuck his cigar in his mouth and went over to the earl and look on the way picked up another

salt shaker and put it in his pocket when he got over to the Earl he took it

out and we've been noticed sweet back

and the message is if you want more to

the message is if you want people to go

along with you then you have to involve them in the same conspiracy and modern

day computer design I submit is almost

entirely what the users need to do and

who the users are it's a new conspiracy

this that I'd like to see it first

where has been last in any design process thank you very much

[Applause]

any questions that is a dream of Apple

that we have and let me substantiate the

dream a little bit by pointing out that

these ideas that we thought up at Xerox PARC are now 15 years old and and

because iBM is now interested in them we know that they're obsolete it is that

pervasive networking which i think is really the major agenda that mean we

could say why isn't the telephone company been thinking about this much longer phrase which I saw in a slide

this morning was thought up by John and written in paper 8 and the notion to

deal with an information utility was thought up a long time ago it was

realized that once you have pervasive networking the kind of user interface

works with the children everything else doesn't work nearly as well anymore

take a Macintosh style user interface

hard disk work to it and the browsing

that helped you so much that we sell we

now have 8% of the business market about 90% of the machines we sell into

the Fortune 1000 company we sell because they can pay for the machines out of the

training costs that they save they save

about two weeks of training for every Macintosh that they said that they buy

and so all of those things that are on

there in fact start breaking down a little bit when you have thousands of

things that can consider and remember when I was a child I was visiting

somebody in Washington DC and I had a question I wanted to answer and I was in

library to that question I heard they

had a library see so I got my mother's

alright discovered that the card catalog of the Library of Congress was much

larger than my hometown library

discovery when I was there is that no person going into the Library of

Congress actually I'm still there the

people are people who are experts in the real strategies for using person I got

one of those Peabody's like that people

attached to me for the hour or so it took to my question long time because

all the things we think of as being modern user interface techniques start

falling down terribly because the user interface that we designed at park we're

reactive not proactive to volume level

of resources and need to learn new things and the imponderables to a or a

million different things then you need a proactive user interface that kind of

user interface was thought up actually again in the early 60s and given a name

called agents an agent is a semi

intelligent computer product take on so

structure you may work 95 and without

you ever seeing it it's one of the death season let me show you this tape this is

why

[Music]

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you need to take Kathy to the airport by 2:00

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[Music]

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research

to recheck these figures of deforestation you predicted

[Music] I have a simulation that shows the

spread of the Sahara

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would you leave a message this is your mother I know that you're

there [Music]

that's why we say the the IBM attempts

to do user interface are sort of like putting béarnaise on a hot dog that

these ideas to do a user interface doesn't live here as it takes to refine

it many of the people that have been working on this concept the agents for

more than ten years now exist ten years

ago people who have come to Apple in the number of years and by the time 1995

rolls around there will be enough networking and so forth so that all of

the user interface techniques that we

now think are a vanguard commend me with something that is much

more proactive more anthropomorphic and

probably squadrons of the agents rather than just a single one that's what we're

working on very hard to do because the

again we're doing a project a very large your children again working with agents

because the one of the hardest things about agents is that they have to be able to learn and there's nothing in

artificial intelligence right now to

bridging the gap systems and what even cats and dogs are able to do and so

we're doing what you might call basic research very basic research in trying

to produce artificial mentalities that can actually be resourceful and learn

for example US Apple may have some

environments

mm-hmm well they do want to talk to us now and what I'm saying is is that there

there's a tension between Apple believes and Apple is not like Steve Jobs was

where the company just go it alone we

would do in IBM in five years and so forth on the other hand the prevailing

wisdom and even people on the Apple board six years ago really thought Apple

should do a PC crumb that was but that

was the standard and if you want it well

you have to work within the existing Santa you see the problem is is that there's a creative tension the standard

rock you in to obsolete ideas

domain that actually release you

difference between defining and data structure which is the the worst thing

you can ever do because then every

procedure in the system thinks it knows something about how to use that data

structure make any change you have to find all the things that have

assumptions about it versus doing something in which the object is able to

protect itself and complain and even adapt so yes I agree I agree with some

of those ideas but I also believe that the that in one sense given how by the

is all right I think we're at a place where companies can't afford not to be

current with things that were done 15 years ago figures and so I think the

companies at least have to say what we're aware of this stuff basically

should something like well the Objective C people say mumble mumble rejecters see

people didn't invent programming

and asking people who invented object-oriented programming what it is and what it might do so I think going

through second secondary areas and hearsay and stuff doesn't help help very

much either and the important thing to understand is that no user interface counts until

you've tried it out for many many years

variety of users I mean Scully had to say to the

educators at edge accom that please don't expect this by Christmas this is

not a product that Apple is doing it's it's a way of thing flaws in this we're

gonna redo the movie because it was it was done rather hastily and the people

who did the movie missed the important idea that the thing is portable and so

number one you've never print printing destroys almost everything that's interesting about information and number

two he would have it with him so at the end of the movie instead of abandoning

his mother he as his mother said I know you're there he would simply close the book

so getting these visions set up is a very important thing getting them set up

and so that they're at such a high level of aesthetic romanticism because the

romanticism is the thing that gets as you implement a set of design is that

after you've been implementing for five years is to have something of the original spark left in the final result

this thing in Hollywood called war mode so about four to six pictures done in

war mode and that is when they get to the point where the deadlines are just so crushing they just stay up night and

day people write software this way the

problem with the war mode Zion is done during it and so you wind up with this

incredible pile of baling wire and stuff whose only structural integrity is the

structural integrity of the programming system that you're that you're working in and since they have almost none

generally then you're indeed it's just

that simple yeah I think talking but see the talking

shouldn't mean the least common denominator it's what I hate about television television communicate

communication on television means that we're not going to assume that anybody has really learned the English language

human eggs and pratfalls it's not whit

whit requires you to understand language and something that you can allude to and

I don't think that's good enough I think the a better way and that's I

have a huge objections to systems like UNIX whose notion of inner processor

communication is let's send a string for one process to another how can UNIX be the great white hope

when it wasn't actually a good design when it was done in 1971 and just

because it is better than even worse designs you say I was saying at Xerox

PARC that relative judgments have no place in art doesn't matter whether Bach

was better than Beethoven it's not not an operable question the real question is what's the difference

between great and not great UNIX is not great but doesn't matter how much better

it is than anything poorer than it I think we have to go above and a my

feeling about what protocols are about and what networks are about is that people are thinking very much along the

same kind of limited lines at Unix you don't want to send strings because

strings have to be parsed at the other end there's no context that goes along with strings you want to send something

like objects that means that the whole set well about what it means object

3,000 miles and have it be viable and able to function able to explain itself

able to integrate itself all of those things at the other end there's no way

that people are going to do I don't

believe any configuration system is going to be able to do that and the reason I say that is that some some of

the best systems that were ever done we're done by the another group at Xerox PARC

system called cedar that in fact had very similar architecture to the one

that you're talking about here and it was it was better than anything that

gone before but the configurations manager was a nightmare to deal with

because it was never quite sure when you hooked in the component whether you were

hooking in something that was really going to do what you wanted it to do or whether you're simply hooking in

something in which the interfaces were compatible right one thing that have the

interfaces be compatible and another thing for understanding that the actual

functions that's going to execute for you are what you want that is the

nightmare of doing components and inheritance any other questions yes

the statements that power supplies for power source was the biggest impediment

to something like the Dynamo getting that time frame the last six seven eight

months shouldn't the variety of things

the if you look at the laboratories of the Japanese companies then you will see

the displays the first displays that are good enough to be on a Dynabook and so I

I say that those are here and the power consumption our nose is not so bad the

power consumption on the processor is powerful enough to do a lot of these

things it's not so bad it's about a wad or so and the the thing that is

difficult it's at a rapid speed as

possible to build a Dynabook this very instant if you had a system they switch

in and out you know there because the system would have like ten or twenty

megabytes of RAM some of the RAM would

be used the way we use files today although there would be no files in it

but some of it would be stuff that you weren't currently working on and a

couple of megabytes would be stuff that you were currently working on and if the

system were able to idle the stuff that you weren't working on then the power consumption would be reason and the

power consumption that that we thought was a minimal is something like 10 to 15

hours of being able to do anything that you want it and right around the corner

but I think to me the dining book was never a piece of four it was a

head-mounted display with a thing you could slip in your pocket - to me the dining book was always a service concept

and there I think you could say that simply translating the Macintosh unit

user interface into a 2-pound system

with twenty megabytes of RAM is not it Macintosh is is

is the first person criticized and

that's that is my opinion of it you know it is a Apple the heck of a risk to do

it I'm glad they did but in fact no matter how you slice it the Macintosh is

an embodiment of things that we thought were important in the early 70s it

doesn't reflect things that have been discovered since then and the kinds of

integration it has although the best in the industry are not even close to what

you really need just to give you an example the one of the big principles in

user interface design is what we called results mode interaction the idea is

there you should always be working in the context is going to be think about

the Mac it does that a little bit spreadsheets and other kinds of things

that run on it but in fact if you think about making up a document what do you

do you shouldn't get your and you go

after this application maybe get your text and you go after this one you get your pictures you cut and paste them

bringing them back in why not just work in the context of your document and you

have a super document in which the paragraphs are actually windows into

your favorite top ten applications right that's better integration Macintosh

doesn't have it nobody else does either and that's just because the Apple people

decided to use the cut and paste metaphor that was one of the things we tried out at Parc a long time ago it's

not the best way to do it so I know the

thing to be a dining book for me I'd like to see it reflect what we

understand what we had Apple feel very

critical about in our own user interface I think he could do it Dynabook without

going into the agent idea I think sort

of a Mac you know a Macintosh double star type user interface that was also

programmable the other thing about the Mac user interface and other interfaces

is that they're not programmable in any way and the major idea behind the whole

thing was that you're supposed to be able to finish this delete three files by simply picking them up with your hand

and dumping them in the trashcan but you shouldn't have to do for leaving fifty three files and then

somehow we had solutions for this apart somehow the user interface would teach

you what the symbolic equivalents were of your concrete action wanted it to do

something more and powerful and you have

a reason you shouldn't have to read an ms-dos X to delete three file but for

reading fifty three files you shouldn't have to do it by hand and so the big the

big slogan that I made up for that interface is that doing with images make

symbols and that the concrete actions of

your hands and your eyes should lead you to symbolic renderings of those things

that are more powerful through abstraction that doesn't exist that will

in the next few years and that will be a heck of a good user interface before we

start bringing the agents onto the world the agents are gonna take a long time to

do because the agents raise expectations that can't be fulfilled another way of

thinking of using interface is the most important thing you can ever do in a user interface is to subtly broadcast

what it can't do the Mac works partly

because almost every guest a user make is fulfilled people an enormous number

of percentage of people never read any of the manuals on the Macintosh and I

pointed out to Apple that since that's true we should never put anything important in a manual so first as most

Mac users don't know that you can extend a selection by the thing called

shift-click of holding down the shift key and clicking that will extend an

existing selection because there's nothing in the user interface that tells you you can do that it's in a manual and

if you haven't read the manual you never learn that and that is a very bad thing to do the agents are exactly the

opposite to use shouldn't that can't be

fulfilled their answer for morphic so we immediately expect them to understand us

like people we meet expect them to do things like people no way only we do

this film we're going to redo it as we did it at Atari some years ago we did a

bunch of agents where we use cartoon characters

you can also broadcast through there exactly they are now if we were to do an

agent an agent today we want something like Porky Pig or Elmer Fudd where you

just have very low expectations the

agent ever brings anything back that's interesting to use they all boy that great there may be something like Pluto

you know Pluto ever winds up with the bright news paper back you say oh good

dog I'm not kidding because that's

that's one of the reasons why age agents have been thought about for a long time

at the big TV stations that get you very

very angry when they're not worked out and so a lot of the design is how do you

defuse user expectations but still make them want to use the agents for what

they're good for I've been working on it I've been working for almost a decade

yeah and it's a very interesting process of doing the design besides all the AI

and other junk that goes on underneath

yes there's this concept of agents that

you seem to be going towards is that in a really obviate point of trying to

design the intuition in the interface well I think because it appears that you

know it's icon or itself driven the user has to make a choice and it appears in

this example using agents he's just saying I have a request now you get it

for me well I think I think to the point I think they're there to I think a lot

of retrieval I mean a good example where standard icon driven things break down

is because this is an agent that we built at MIT a few years ago called News

peak and what it is is an agent that

stays up all night logging into information sources like the New York

Times and the Association or a newspaper

a personal newspaper for you to read a breakfast okay so it goes into Nexus and

the stuff and reads the articles in the fine Rondon vo disk that has 45,000

pictures of famous people Z for morgue

Iran Paris Francis mentioned it finds a

map on a map disk uses an expert system to layout the thing what you get is

something that looks like your own personal version of USA Today right it

might say in Afghanistan or might just as easily say your 3 o'clock meeting was

canceled today because one of the new sources that goes to is your own electronic mail but you've gotten

anything interested the night before and it tries to screen that and see whether

it's important a sidebar might say your children slept well last night I think

redefines news Telegraph move literary

remember that the Federalist Papers which were the justifications for why

the Constitution should be ratified were published in the New York newspapers

nowadays we think of them as something being so literary that most children

shouldn't even read them actually the

kind of thing of newspapers in the late 1700s the telegraph changed that by

making currency more important than depth Terry look since 1840 there so and

now we're saying that what we're getting is something that's basically a slice of

interest ok so there's an example of an

agent now think about the process for trying to get the agent to know what

things that should go after think about trying to set up any kind of information

system you've ever used trying to set that up forget it and the agent we did

at MIT does three-quarters of its workplace watching how you read the

articles and tries to get some what it's trying to do is come up with a sort of

what you might call a meta collection of notions for describing the kinds of

things that you're interested in that have no particular keywords or any other standard information retrieval

paraphernalia done over a period

gradually learns and the agent visits the agent at MIT periodically comes and

asks you about sir you have to see just

to check out and see whether you are so

I think that the having an obvious user

interface that has some metaphors to the world of objects and so forth it's

always going to be there but I think there's going to be enormous amount of things in which the the kind of

information you want has no obvious keys into it and the agent is going to be

gradually formulating over the life justice is going to be learning how to

understand you're speaking better and better one thing has been completely missed by people who do speak correct

each recognition so almost everybody who's ever done it try to do this is the

old time-sharing way of doing it we have to have a facility on our central computer that can I understand multiple

speakers and stuff like that in a Mac -

that's your Mac - Mac - squeezed down to the thing that's in your pocket can be a

speech recognizer the recognizer that lives you with you for 40 or 50 years

learning as it goes it doesn't have to understand anybody else's speech except

yours and that it'll be easier video

synthetic speech from a wide variety of sources the technology has almost been

ignored in the last 10 or 15 I stated

country in which changed changed

and things that were inconceivable and they're still thought of inconceivable receivable

we're often inconceivable twenty years ago because nothing was and nothing was

right for doing it and just as in sketchpad we have not done a sketchpad

today because the all of the assumptions that said sketchpad was not a good idea to try and do in the 60s are no longer

true but nobody remembers them so it's simply something that you know will be

done graduates or even an undergraduate

project and we'll have some more in the world these gaps are really just one my

favorite saying of Marvin Minsky's they are I understand something unless you

understand it more than one way I think

that's the best way no matter how much you think you understand it if you don't have two ways of understanding it or

more than two ways of understanding you don't understand it you're trapped in the context thank you very much

[Applause]

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