Alan Kay Preparation Interview for at XT 20 Conference

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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