Difference between revisions of "Alan Kay talk at UCLA CS Connection Lab"

Latest revision as of 01:37, 27 February 2024

okay everyone um

I'm here today with isan K we're at the UCLA

connection lab uh with professor kleinrock and the rest

of our students here uh we are very lucky to have Alan

who is presenting on a broad range of

topics ranging from technology society and future research

and I'll keep it short so

uh Isen needs no further introduction I will let him begin right

away thank you so

much okay onward we

go so the way this started off is my

long long friend uh

Len kleinrock sent me an email

saying would I do a talk

and I wasn't

sure

says about the view of the current you know basically

about everything most rewarding

work in my life I'm 84

years old guys

and can I do it in just a few

minutes and of course I said okay

and uh the wonderful

Jason gathered

up a bunch of questions and

I endeavored to look at all all of them

and combine them in one way or another

but uh

the short an answers here

are uh is it

still feasible today to do something like zorox Park and

the answer is yes I don't know of

anything like zorox Park in the

computer realm of things

uh they're all so goal

oriented uh but I've there's

a great Biology Institute funded by the

foundation called janelia labs

in near Washington DC and there's the famous

Max plank Institute and

see a little bit why I don't

consider there's a lot with

the same kind of spirit as ZX

as I'll say in the moment it wasn't zerox

Park zerox Park was

part of the much larger

arpa uh research

committee and considered it it was just funded by

Xerox because the department def had quit

funding arpa the right way and put the D on and changed

everything so we'll see about that

in a minute and

a short answer do I believe PE young people today

have to solve a harder problem in requiring

resources and my answer is yes

absolutely it is much much harder

as the businesses

have moved in

which started really strongly in the

80s after the inventions of personal Computing

and uh P pervasive and local

networking there was something to

that could be and

the and the gooey which

open up the computer to the

rest

sorry go ahead I I could hear people talking

yeah um yes so

it's much harder much much harder

and

there wasn't time to really answer

these uh completely separately

so I sort of wo them together

and I

like this one this is a recent one what are some

of the most tragic illusions that adults

with that is the most flattering thing I've

heard in years because it assumes I'm not an adult

which I'm not

uh number two was what did you guys being there at Xerox

Park do for them

and then there's this dot dot dot one

which I did do a little prep on it but I

left it to the end in case we run out of

time because in 84 years

uh I've had a lot of aha moments but

um let's start off with number

one this is part

of the tragic Illusions

what we're doing right now and what we do in most

classrooms is to recapitulate

something that happened 150,000 years ago

which is a bunch of people gathering around a

campfire listening to somebody

talk and just

think about it for a second how crazy

is it for me to be doing what I'm doing now

this is why I sent a couple of papers along to read

it's crazy to orally discuss

ideas inventions that required reading and writing

and explain the

oral medium is not good for what it

the best of the stuff that we

do but

we all have the same pink brains

they love stories and so

what this guy wants is a story

and what I'm trying to do is

to comply to tell stories about

things that really aren't very good as

stories and the problem was we're still basically

the same uh species

with the same pink brain that wants

tories and systems

aren't stories I'm basically a systems

guy

and if we take a look at what happened going back a few

hundred thousand years human genetics

yeah it's changed a little bit we

some of us got to be able to digest milk

and so forth

and human

ventions gradually took

off and with modern

theories about origins of languages

a lot more of language seems to be an invention

via culture than

uh we thought in the past and then we

have this problem which I hope you can see

there because my little thing is

blocking um

our Collective wisdom

started being informed by our inventions

but it grew at a much slower rate because the

inventions are uh various forms of

technology including symbolic Technologies

they turned out to be really easy once we got the hang of

it and so we've got this

huge gap

so we can turn the guy's spear into a Tomahawk

missile we can increase his power of

Destruction by a factor of a million

and we could do something much much worse which is to

turn him into a bureaucrat

and create bureaucracy

and bureaucracy has killed millions

and millions more people than the worst Atomic

weapons so

this is a huge problem

and education

something about it we'll talk about that a little bit

later but think about it we

just went through the inability of most

of the population of the planet to not

understand how viruses and diseases work

that was botched almost

everywhere and for

the last 60 plus years we've been

ignoring something smaller than a virus the CO2

which is gradually

changing the entire planet that we live

on so if you're looking for

human wisdom it's not up to

the scaling of what we've been able to

invent

okay so cliff notes for human beings

I'll do this quickly

but so we're basically

Hamlet

our minds are like theaters

we're more theatrical than we think we treate

create our treat our beliefs as reality

that is the worst thing about human

beings and these theaters are tiny we can

only think of a few things that once it's hard for us

to take in larger

things and if you look into biology

we find out that most of our mind is not

human and we're more non-human

than we assume and we tend to react

much more than actual thinking thinking actually had

to be invented we grow up in

we were born into

and that shapes so much of who we are and also

how we look at the world our conclusions

tend to be societal that's a

disaster and we have

not just one mind and

really not just one brain we maybe have

about 80

different conglomerations of things that could be

called brainlets

uh we have a special set of ones

shared with most animals which is learning

by touching things we learn

seeing things we have a completely different set of

knowledges from how things look

and uh we have this

symbolic mechanism

which is both our

uh down downfall and our

Salvation so we're much

more fragmented we only have one body

but uh what we want

actually conflicts

internally so this is

a a whole area that's really

worthwhile studying especially in

this age of computation and especially

this area I'll leave it at

that now let's go to the the

second question is what did we ever do

Xerox anyway

well we'll talk a little bit later about where zor

Park came from but here are some of the things that

did so the uh first

thing like a modern personal

computer uh the the

goey with icons and

pointing

basically a way of

uh dealing with symmetrical

reading and writing that was also what you see

get what we have to call real oop today

that we only called oop back then but it was

a different than what is called to

today and we did the laser

printer which just for the engineers in the

crowd the very first laser printer was a page

a second which most people have never

experien today at 500 pixels

to the inch so that is a great

story all by itself How Gary Starkweather

did that uh

the outline fonts and postcript the ethernet

peer peer and client server and

about half the internet

actually had its own internet which is called the park

Universal packets uh

it was spread all over the country and

uh about I don't know

half the general meetings

that were held at UCLA especially

were done by Park people some of whom

had already done some of the things that working at

yeah the thing is is that

all of these things came out of a particular

community so we locked the claim we

had eight and a half visible inventions and

of course what's interesting about all of this

is all the

technology that had to be invented that was uh

invisible and according to Butler

Lamson this was done

uh with about 25 researchers over about five

years these particular ones I'm showing

here and the park

park itself existed in the form it was for

about 10 years so in

total uh today's dollars

here is like I don't know 15

years ago or so when I made the slot

so it was uh in

dollars of 15 years ago it was about 10

million dollars a year or about 100

million to 120 million for the

for the 10 years and park had four Labs

so there was system science computer science

Optical science and physical science

so this is the total budget of

Park and when I

first did this slide of 15

years years ago or so the return was about $35

trillion to the world now

I think it's up past 50 trillion

or so and to get back to the question

is uh

oh and this is an important idea that the thing that confused

people and Confused Xerox was if you can

these eight and a half inventions you see in

in Industry it is the

basis of the one of the main

large Industries uh that we have

today

now what about return to park well Park

missed I mean zerks missed most of these

but it doesn't matter because the return

on the laser printer all by itself

was about a factor of 200

on the entire investment for park over the

ntire 10 years so

Zer made billions and billions just

from this one thing they missed the

trillions but

uh if you look at it from a positive direction

thank goodness they're willing to fund

people that no business person in their right mind would

fund so we got what we

got now

the real story here is that back in the 40s

the Cold War started with the Russian AB

bomb after World War II and that

gave rise to a bunch

of DOD funding which included Whirlwind

which we'll talk about in a minute the

sage air defense system

we'll talk about in a minute and then in 57 Sputnik

came along and that created arpa

we'll talk about that in a minute and here are some

the things that arpa did

up to the time when the Vietnam War and

Congress decided to kill arpa funding

for public domain

Computing so you can look at these yourself

so things like uh personal Computing

uh computer Graphics

packet switching that handsome guy in the patch packing

switch switching thing on the the right is

none other than Len

kleinrock looking very confident as we all were

back then that led to the arpanet

and that led to the internet

and the first tablet was really

good one that was done back in 1964 and

then there was the engelbart system and so

forth so park was

actually set up

because uh one of the

uh Deputy directors of

arpa

ipto feared that this work was not

going to be continued to some kind of fruition

so he started looking around and it happened that Xerox

was looking around for a long range research

lab and they got together and the

the lab was put as far away from corporate

headquarters as possible uh

next to a university so it's either going to be Berkeley

or Stanford they put it next to

Stanford and um

Park completely thought of itself as

being part of the Opera Community almost every computer

researcher there had been a graduate

student at and had their degrees

paid for by arpa and so forth so I never

talk about Park without bringing in

larger context and in fact

it the larger context was the reason that Park

was able to do so many things

with so few researchers there was

all of this prior art available

in the research community and the resch search

Community also taught the grad students how to work

together I'll talk about that in a

minute

okay here's uh feedback from

world push back look at some

disly low

like here are the

Heartbreakers on the other hand 100%

of the internet 100% of the ethernet

100% of the laser printer outline

font pierer and all that stuff were accepted

and this is in large part because there weren't

good Solutions already out

here the

50% on the PO modern personal computer

is because the people who adapted

this to the commercial World

basically adapted it

uh in its appearances they didn't

look any deeper uh

most of the hackers in the 80s thought they knew

how to program so their interest in doing

really new ways of programming was very low so the least accepted

thing was the way we did successful

software at Park

and some of the deepest

ideas uh that our field has ever come up with

were done by uh engelbart and his group

and almost none of those have even

be understood and you know if I were there and person

what I always do is ask students

what angelart did and they usually can't tell me

and it's hard to find a student

in fact let's do it right now just for the hell

of it okay students

can you hear me raise your

hand

okay let's see

what do I want here

yes so students

please tell me anybody who's T

typed e n g l B- a

r t into Google

raise your

hand

I think one hand is Professor Clan rock well

of course okay so

this is basically being in

being in physics being

a physics major and uh stop being

Newton so this is not an

exaggeration think about

it and you know if you want some bitching from an old

fart a lot of us back in the

old days put out a lot of

uh effort including Len in the

room to get you guys personal

computers which you have with you

and to get you guys networks that can connect

to things and to get you so you can be

just a few characters and a mouse push

away from satisfying your curiosity

about the heroes of your own profession

think about that and none of you have done

that what do you think about

hat okay

so let's now go quickly back again

Russian a bomb

Whirlwind so

this is just a few racks of

Whirlwind at MIT was

actually just a 16bit

bit parallel real-time mini computer

but it took this amount of space had about 5,000 vacuum

tubes and the memory

devices back around 1950

were so bad for storage

for Ram that

uh it forced uh one of

the

uh the guy in the middle there

Jay Forester to invent core memory

which was the technology that let computers

uh go commercial for the first

time and the guy to his

uh let's see to his left the

guy who's uh

standing behind them in the middle of the picture

there Jay

Everett

um

whoops oh now it's not letting me

I hate Zoom

okay

sorry

okay also with this

was uh one of the earliest displays

and uh Everett had

had uh

actually

sorry ever had

actually invented a way to point at the

screen and this is the as far as

the first time there was computer

graphics with a pointing

device and they did this because

the Cold War changed their original

theory about what they were doing which was

uh to make flight simulators

uh and they were starting to lose their funding for

that but uh the atomic bomb

of the Russians got the military

interested in whether you could hook a computer

up to radar and track it and they were

the first to do this and that

hey built back then morphed its way into the

worldwide uh airplane

tracking system that we used to

day then the second phase of Whirlwind

was to go

all out and see if we could

track Russian bombers

before they could uh get to us

and so they built these monstrous

block houses out of concrete

this is about the size they

were bottom floor there is just the

power supply the second second floor here

are two really big Q7

computers with maybe 55,000

vacuum tubes gang

together uh they're really something

walk around in

here's a block house so

24 of these were built in the

US then up on the top

floor were 100 to about

150 graphic terminals

with pointing devices for dealing with various

of information and

here's what one row of them look

like so there are zillions

of them and this is about maybe 1956

57

now

and they had a network wasn't

a great Network it wasn't a packet switching

network but they' gotten used to the idea

that if you're going to build computers and have people

work together you better have a network and some

way of doing that so this

crowning Glory was just coming to fruition

when the Russians decided oh

well let's just shoot some

Rockets to show The Americans that we don't need to

deliver bombs by a bomber we can

you make icbms

so this shocked the and

Congress and they set up arpa

Advanced research projects agency

the director uh

in the early 60s was Jack

ruen and

he decided to

uh give this guy uh

Jacob licklider known as lick

some leftover money they had which

by DOD standards wasn't a lot but by computer computer

standards it was millions

and they they gave it to him because they liked him and you'll

you'll get an idea about this

soon and so here are the

1960s directors of

arpa not a military person among them these were all

PhD

scientists and the four arpa

computer research directors were all

scientists and this is because

the powers that set this up

realized that having something like the military

and something like congress

with a dire threat

were trying to deal with would just botch things up

still true today

so but

of course Congress ultimately control

the budget but they didn't have

much power because the Americans were were

frightened of the Russians

and so they weren't

going to curtail military spending

but people in Congress would say

these words that everybody has heard Still today

how is this relevant tell me why this work that you're doing is

relevant to the Department of Defense and

they would get push back from these

scientist Jack would say that's not the right

question to ask Bob spra Senior would say the

right question to ask is how is this going to help the United

States or this technology or our society or our

culture generally holy

Bob Taylor's remark

was they would stand up to these guys

and in a polite civilized way attack their

myopia because these arpa directors were scientific

Statesmen

and Bob reflects we've had too few of those people

in the job since then

and around 1966

Charlie hersfield asked bobw what

what do you want and Bob said uh this network

is what I want to do and here's why

and Charlie said

okay and Bob's recollection that was a

15minute conversation

Charlie asked how much money do you need and Bob said well a million

dollars is so it's like seven or eight billion seven or eight

million dollars today just to get it organized

and uh herzfeld said

okay and Bob's recollection was that there was

no actual arpa paperwork order written or anything

for months maybe even a year

these people all trusted each other and

did a lot of things very quickly this

way now a key idea here if you can see

him is that Bob

Taylor uh after

arpa went on to be the

founder uh of the computer science

research at Xerox Park so he was the

connection as of course the computer science

research park at Park was set up like

the computer science research of

arpa and so when we look at

this we want to see

what what did these people weigh back then

think about this we have all

these questions that we can't answer all of them today

we can look at the first couple there and we can get a

couple of samples of what they were saying

so veva

Bush uh pronounced the way

Beaver is pronounced in New England beava

beniva Bush who is president

Rosevelt science advisor said

in the 40s holy new forms of encyclopedias

will appear readymade with a mesh

of associative Trails running through them ready to be

dropped into the mimics and they're Amplified so

that got a lot of people

thinking Li glider said in a few years

the combination of humans and computers will think as no

humans have ever thought

before John McCarthy looked at

the sage system and said every home will have one

and with an intelligent interface because

he thought way McCarthy thought about it is well this

is just like uh getting gas and Water

and Electric power and so forth into a house

it's a utility so every house

will have a uh a terminal connected to a

worldwide utility that was

1958 that affected the work at MIT

by uh Corby Fernando

corbo Ivan suin

the inventor of computer Graphics said a graphic input

coupled to some kind of computation which

is in turn coupled to a graphical output is a

truly powerful tool for Education design

and angelart here said we can boost Mankind's capability

for coping with complex urgent Problems

by augmenting the collective IQ

of groups not just augmenting people

but augmenting

roups

and I'm going to more concentrate more

on these two but we'll get a look at a bit

okay so what what with these guys

looking for as far as people look was just

looking for the best people Ivan was

looking for people uh who could choose their own problems and

methods Taylor's

thought his job was to

fix up the social environment so that when the

no Lone Wolf scientists needed to cooperate

they will and

Larry uh said

everybody understood the game

here which was arpa

ipto was allowed to help the country as long as it was helping

the military and so what

kind of people were they looking for this man right here is

my great-grandfather he's the first cat herder in our

family don't let anybody tell you it's

easy anybody can hurt cattle

holding together 10, half wild SS

that's another thing all together

well you get you get the idea

and so the real question here is what if only cats can do this

stuff and adults don't

get it adults are into command and control

and command and control doesn't work with cats

have a jar fill all the names of the toys we have

sitting right next to us and we're going to take the jar one by

one open up these toys all right would you like to go first

piing something from the jar yes all right

now it's on a spring I like

all

it's inside this box right here

there's this little mouse on a spring is go up and

down and cats are going to try to catch it all righty our cats

like having mouses but they keep on tearing them apart CU

they're kind of vicious so got another one

okay and this is the toy

mouse what is this

what is this mysterious

George I think you get

it gotta have some feel for what cats

want so

lick pointed out right at

the beginning that great Visions are not the same as

goals but they are the ultimate cat

oy so

he stuck to this Vision which is not

phrased as a goal he said computers are destined

to become interactive intellectual

amplifiers for everyone universally networked

worldwide he did not know

what this meant and in fact he was a psychologist

not a what we call a card carrying

engineer but he

understood a lot

that if you hide if you take this

vision and stick it behind the mountain

range it sends out magnet field which is

Marvin Minsky like to point out if you don't

know what to do get lots of people to do lots of things

that's what lick was doing

and so the number one principle here of

doing anything like this where you are going to

get have the possibility of

really large new things is the goodness

of the results correlates most strongly with the goodness of

the funders that is my

reflection uh for from the past

because every era has really

smart people I've never

been in an era that didn't have people as smart as the people I

worked with back then but the funders

have were wonderful in the 60s

and uh 70s and they've been

uh ever more terrible ever

since

and so two of the main things that came

out of this was human humans and

computers working together as an idea and

then this larger idea of augmenting human intellect

in general so I'll just go through these quickly

million of them they're in one of the papers I handed

out but basically go against

conventional wisdom do Visions

not goals let

somebody else do the goals fun problem finding

not just problem solving this is a key

one because a problem

is often too rooted in the uh context

he present

and so if you're just doing that which is kind of what's

going on this is what NSF likes to fund

problems that peer reviewers can understand in the present

and most most of them uh don't make

big contributions

problem finding on the other hand is difficult for

everybody but it gives you a

chance fun people not

projects so in other words don't

worry you know if you've got some crazy guy who's really

good or girl who's really good

don't worry about what they want to do

give them some money and see what happens

uh corollary fund of very best people

I don't think that's being done

today and an important part of the research

results are new and better researchers

and in in a sense

NSF is paying for some of this

but I don't think a lot of research is being done I think

it's mostly engineering so what I think is what

NSF is paying for are new and better

uh uh practical

engineers and what we need is new and better

researchers really Advance something very important

well that's controversial because it probably

uh is something

new and here's a key one design

build in the future and bring back to the

present and one that costs a lot of

money was make enough of the inventions

and in a practical enough manner so that

many people can use them in other words live

in your own uh your own mess that

you've made then Milestones

not deadlines

one

okay so

here are five things that of

many things that people

are in the indidual individual stars there are

people get interested in Aesthetics

or they prefer to Tinker they prefer to do

engineering but the problem is The Sweet

Spot in the center

is something we have to get to because as Marvin says

you don't understand

something if you only understand it one way

this is a key phrase for the 20

20th and 21st centuries

and so no matter what

your favorite one of these is you have to get fluent

in all of them and this is a not

he way universities are set up not the way companies

are set up but you got to do it

the best people I know all are in the center

here and then there's a question about

regarding Computing is is could there actually

be a science of computing they

are artificial objects after all

we're not looking at molecules so

forth we're looking at constructed

things and what does that mean as a

science

so go back into the 50s

again we've got

phenomena we can see these artifacts they've got

wires and vacuum tubes and we can program them

and we can make a high LEL language for them like Fortran

and so forth and that isn't really

science what is

cience well I've

got this cryptic phrase here scientists try to find

fireflies and make

t-shirts what does that mean

it means that behind the stuff

that distracts us

there are hidden

deeper properties the properties

might not even be in there explicitly but they're

there what scientists do

is good what I call good

woooo which is

they let their brain relax to

point where they can start thinking beneath the surface of

things and here's one of the first computer

scientists John McCarthy and he

looked at this stuff in the 50s and decided to

t-shirt of it and the

t-shirt looks like

this so it's kind of backwell

equations of computing and what's interesting about

it is that it doesn't look like

uh the hardware and it doesn't look like the software it's

actually a mathematical

formulation of what John thought the most important

relationships were so I would call this

maxwellian then

stronger stronger

along the lines of Newton which is to

explain important ideas

here about what was lying beneath

the surface and why it was really useful

to think of doing things in a particular

way and the thing

about math is it has to be consistent meaning

neat but it doesn't have to be

real and so this thing that John did was

not real but another hero

of mine Steve Russell the guy who invented space war

was at MIT and he looked at

John's math and he said that's

a program if I implement it we'll have a running system

and John McCarthy said well he did and we did

and that was the birth of

lisp and here's the cool thing about Computing

the theory can also be the model and the artifact

and you can make it

real but there are a lot of complaints about

dealing with pure semantics is

too slow even after

factor of a million or a billion

of or more of more moris

law still seems to be too slow

on the other hand

you can build a special machine for

these semantics that don't fit on regular

machines because remember

our computer's only there to run programs so why not make

a computer that will run the programs you want to

run and if you try to optimize too early

like buying a computer before

that isn't a supercomputer before you've done your

research you're in trouble because now you're

forced to deal with its problems rather than your

own so this is the kind of process

that the arpa community went

hrough

and this is a fun story but

I want to bring up the fireflies again

you can't replicate what John

McCarthy did because the

times are different now but the fireflies

in what he did are still there and they can still

what to do

okay here's uh Story

number two 62

years ago in 1962

this is in the

uh Sage experimental

uh test computer called the

tx2 it was one of the LA one one of these

computers that was the building

and right down at the end of one corner was this guy sitting

of a oscilloscope

screen and what was he doing

well

here's the light pen he was

and now this display

doesn't isn't a line drawing display it just makes a

DOT so the there's a program

making these lines now he tells sketchpad

to make them all mutually perpendicular and you

just saw it automatically

uh clean up the drawing this is why it's called sketch pad because

you can just draw roughly he may wants

to make a hole in this

flange so he says here make

these both uh uh

parallel and perpendicular and

now the constraint is

make these lines I'm drawing to be collinear with the

guidelines below so this allows

him to quickly draw a dotted

line

now he's going going to make the guidelines

transparent we get a hole in the flange

and notice this is the first system to have a clipping

window is actually drawing on a canvas

about a third of a mile on a side being windowed

here he needs a

rivet

so this is the rough shape of a rivet

draws this because he wants this as

a center for an AR AR for the top of the

rivet and now he says okay make

all these lines I'm pointing to here

make these mutually perpendicular

and that will force the drawing into

something like a rivet maybe he doesn't

shape

because he didn't constrain the size of the thing so here's another

solution with that those starting

conditions but he said decides he likes the one

first now here's another cool idea Ivan

suland did

which was to have Masters and

instances so

this is not the rivet he drew

this is an instance of the rivet he drew

and the rotation and the scaling

are done by knobs that he has on

console okay

and wants to show you

he can make more instances and that

these instances can be different sizes and

says whoops I forgot

I left the crossbow on there I should make these guys transparent

so he goes to the master drawing and makes them

transparent and lo and behold

all of the instances uh

obey so he gets rid of

the thing and he says okay

make that construction I just did into a

master now I'm going to make instances

master

ight here's

instances of the master

that he made of the

conglomerate

yeah okay

so here's a high resolution picture of Ivan

at the console and he's doing a

something much more complicated which is to

draw in a bridge

and uh unfortunately the movie

for this has been lost it's probably somewhere in Ivan's

garage but uh for fun a couple of years ago

we we uh did a an

emulation of

it so here's a simple trust

bridge and

we can connect things up and if we turn gravity

on which is a constraint

you see it's Computing all the stresses and the

strains on the bridge

and it's continuously Computing so if we add in

another strut

here guess what it ripples over the

entire bridge if we H hang a weight on

it we can stress

bridge and so the big idea here

is it's not just about imitating

drafting it's that we can

simulate uh any kind

of computer AED design drawing that we do

or model and uh

we get not just CAD but CAD

Sim so this

is a huge huge idea

that's still done extremely poorly today

for most

people so

interact this is Ivan's PhD

thesis in 1962

inventing interactive computer Graphics

clipping window pointing iconic IQ objects

Masters and instances we'd call that object

first objectoriented

programming system that I know of

lots of nice technical things in it automatic

Dynamic simulations from

designs and you programmed it not in

the standard uh programming

languages but you programmed it in terms of

goals in terms of the constraints that you want

and sketchpad had three problem solvers that would solve

problems say you could see so I once

asked Ian how could you do this in one year all by yourself

and he said well I didn't know it was

hard check out the fireflies from this

one

today think about what the fireflies

from this one are okay and also in 1962 we

had this guy who was kind of like Moses opening

Sea

he's really interested

in saving the world and trying to make people

better so they can save the world so

his idea in 62 was to

have a screen much he knew about sketch pad he wanted a screen

larger than that he wanted to hang the light pen

from a a gimbal so you're

you could just pull it down to the table and use it like a pencil

and not have the blood run out of your hand

when you're using it and there's this

problem of that he thought about very

deeply which was humans

good Learners

from using tools we

have this pink brain we use tools

brain kind of way

so like a hammer we can use to hammer

a nail into something but we can break something with a

hammer we can do a lot of things with a hammer

and we kind of get a hammerness into

our brain but we get very little

wisdom about tools and

hammers in our brain and

we become a hammerer

100 thousand years later we might decide to

use nuclear weapons on a city that's a way

of hammering them into

submission so part of engelbert's

idea was if you're going to augment human

intellect for crying out loud

you must insert Education and

Training because what's happened is that the

powerful agencies have gone up in power by factors

of millions and our brains

haven't so you want the education

to turn parts of our brain this nice

bluish cast and perhaps give us

a little more wisdom on using our tools and then

a little safer using powerful methods and Powerful languages

and so forth to do things

so this is this five unit thing

engelbart's idea of what you really had to do if you're

going to do this thing and you had to do it not just

for a person but people in groups so the

groups have to be

organized pretty much the same way

this allows to get enormous amounts of synergy

between the individuals they can be

the different stars on the diagram

I just showed you cooperating together

and four years later they

did a first pass at this which was incredibly

impressive it's called the mother of all demos

and uh if you type e n g l

b a r t into

uh Google uh in the first page of

hits you'll find a reference to the movie of that demo

you should see what they were able to do back

little machine

and you know when engelbart's name come up

comes up and even in his obituaries

the the only thing I could really talk about was the mouse

and this really bug

Doug said the mouse the mouse is just

a dial on a car radio we invented a whole

car they won't look at it

you can get an idea of this there are about 70

papers on the website devoted to him

talking about these deep ideas as I

me mentioned previously only about 30%

of what engelbart was talking about

got taken up uh in

Computing today so this is a big huge area

that's got fir Plies everywhere and these are just

three of the 17 or

18 uh principal invest

investigators that arpa put together

so these are the kind of people and

if we talk about cooperation and methods we've

got to talk about the blind

philosophers trying to figure out an elephant

this is a classic thing and

they all have this flaw that I

in the beginning that they think what's between their

ears is uh not belief

but reality so of course this leads to

war

and after thousands of years the idea of compromise

comes about but this does not

need to a pretty picture of an elephant or a

way to make an elephant and in

fact this is my picture of the way Computing is

today practical Computing is just a

horrendous compromise

almost none of it was

necessary

now if you get scientific

philosophers they've learned how to

cooperate in science works by looking at

parts of things and looking

at what other people have looked at other

people looked at other parts of things

and eventually coming to conclusions about the

whole so that's a really good

idea but in fact science

because our brains want to believe rather than think

these can turn into something like a

religion and the reason uh we don't

want to come up with blind belief

there's always

more there's always more and what

it is is something that we can't

imagine so when we give a a name

to something we're hurting our

belief in because we

defined it it's a category now

we've hurt our ability

to think more about it because it already has a

set of properties it already is the thing that the

denotes and here's

a an ad I suggested to Apple

many years ago uh for the

kind of people they wanted to have at Apple what kind should they be and

I suggest well do make a picture of something

like this uh the right

do with

good P implies q and

the left hand the right brain has to be able to do good woow

oo

and what is good wool because

uh the thing the thing to understand here let me just

second here I think to

understand here is it was really hard to

invent good Plies Q

was only invented a few thousand years ago but once we did

it it turned out to be fairly easy for us to

do and humans

are more or less born babies are born with good

woooo uh and woooo

in general and the problem

is that most woooo is actually uh quite

dangerous for the human mind so

to find good woowoo

so here's one

definition art is

a lie that tells the

truth

and learn

the rules like a pro that's the stuff you can do on the right

hand side of the board so you can break them like artist

like an artist on the leftand side of the

board you got to do both or else

just bullshitting around

and this is hard to do in school because as Marvin

said school is the best thing ever invented to keep you from thinking

about something important for more than a few

minutes you have to ask that about where you are

right now even though I'm a professor

there and Len is a

professor uh schools have their own way about

them like the fact

this talk actually has a

uh designed end back at

MIT they would just get Marvin talking and

out of steam in about six hours or so and everybody

happy

here's another genius huge

influence on me he said institutional

education seeks to make the strange familiar

well that that sounds kind of reasonable

yeah that's what we're you're paying them for

things you don't understand you want to Now understand it but

Jerry says the job of real education

is to make the familiar strange again

it's the stuff that we've that has

come embedded into our belief system about

normal that is keeping us

being pedestrian

thinking would you do if normal could seem strange

normal you would have been able to

escape your present if you escape your present

don't forget to use a

Lifeline how do we measure

things well usually with graphs that

go from the left in the

past towards the future going towards

the right and if something goes up

we say a and if it goes down we say boo and so on and

so forth and if you think about this

graphs like this are complete

and the reason is in order

understand whether we should say yay or not

we have to have a threshold and the threshold

here like these could be uh reading

scores for children and uh

the children are never learning to read here

they're getting better or worse

at what they're not being able to do

and so the key to make

is to understand that both better and perfect are the

enemies of what is actually needed better is the tough one

in engineering school because you get rewards for doing something

better but what we're looking for here is

something new and to get something new we

have to come up with the low the minimal

idea that is just above the

threshold it's just into the

blue

and we've once we've stepped into the blue we're actually in

a different way of thinking about things

so this is you know like going from

uh not having mathematics to mathematics

or not going from not having writing to having

writing or going from not having science

to having science these are big

things so you want to look for that star

and the learning curve you might have to start off

below where other people

think you should be but the main thing is to

up there okay so

here's another example world's greatest

hockey player made many many more goals

than anybody and he was not a big

uy

uh had a couple of nice sayings he missed

100% of the shots you don't take people do

that all the time you don't try enough

and here's this big one a good hockey player goes to where the

puck is a great one goes to where

the puck will be and he didn't mean calculating

the trajectory of the puck he meant getting to a place

where one of his teammates could pass

do a quick shot on goal

that was the Wayne gy game and we can play it in

technology so here's an example from my

own career I had a woowoo intuition

about children having their own

portable tablet computers in

1968 which was impossible

back then but the second

stage is can you find a favorable exponential

Mo's law

and this allows you to take this

intuition out 30 years

and out 30 years in the future

could say you can ask

would it be ridiculous if we didn't have this and

30 years that's 1995 the answer is

yeah it' be ridiculous if we didn't have tablet computers

by 1995

okay so you bring it bring the idea back to

the mid 80s can we do

something by the mid 80s

yes but

software takes a long long time

and we're in 1972 now so

what we need to do is to make a bunch of

flexible supercomputer time machines

personal make a lot of them

so the researchers can live and work in the future

that is what we did at Park that dollar

sign says More's law

means that for most

points in the future you can have

them now if you're willing to spend a lot more

money the commodity thing in the

future is the supercomputer of the present

build the right kind of supercomputer in the present

and you now have years to work on these really hard

software ideas and that is where the star

was at Park

uh the dotted line there says you better

do this really quickly or else you're going to get

submerged into tool building

you're going to be doing uh just computers and operating

systems and you're not going to be doing what you're originally

trying to do so you have to be have to be

have a lot of chops to

do this and in fact the alto was done in a period of

about three and a half months by an AB absolute genius

uh Chuck

ther and once You' got this

you can start inventing the software of the future and

the supercomputer nature of it means

something like user interface

you can you don't

have to optimize you can just

uh do 10 experiments a

day for a week throw away your code

don't even bother stay because uh you could put a higher level

language on it you can do experiments you don't have to

optimize you need to find out what the

how the users respond to things and then

right hand side uh if you're

willing to optimize you can do software like is going to

exis in quantity in the 80s

that happens to be uh

the first version of Microsoft Word which was done at

ZX park it made uh Microsoft

many many billions of dollars when it was

released uh 15 years

later right

okay okay we're coming down to the end here

so 1963 lick wrote a

memo members and Affiliates

of The Intergalactic computer

network they asked them why Intergalactic

he said well Engineers always give you less than you're asking

for so I want a worldwide Network so I'm going to ask

for an Intergalactic one and

when they when they quit bitching and moaning and scale it down it's still going

to be worldwide had

this great line here if we succeed

an Intergalactic Network then our main problem

will be learning to communicate with

aliens we'll look at that for in a

minute and

to this psychologist he said at this extreme

the problem is essentially the one discussed by science

fiction writers how do you get

communication started among totally

uncorrelated Sapient beings and he thought

here of that scaling

more or less destroys communication

even amongst humans and scaling

and technology is going to destroy Communications

and so forth so

this is the this is what we need to think

about and he and Bob Taylor wrote a

paper of which I've expanded on a little

bit so the idea is

uh here's a human

who's trying to say I'm come in

peace and the alien is saying uh

maybe I should kill this

guy between two humans

uh a description of something with a man and ho

Hooves and a tail could be a horse for one

guy and a zebra for

another here's our multiple

BL brains I talked about one part of my

brain wants chocolate the other one realizes I should have an

apple then we've got this new thing

the computer

what is what's on its mind not much

and uh it doesn't understand what a horse is that's

ure so when we're talking

else we might not be able to get together on what a

horse or a zebra is but we have a better

hamburger worldwide so

shared context is what we're looking

for and if we find a way and

what we do with language is to try and point

what we think is the shared context between us

person so if we look back at the theater here

what is it what is

shared what the theater is for is to reflect

the intelligence of the audience back to them you're not

trying to teach them I'm not trying to teach

you right now I'm trying to give you something

that you can reflect your intelligence back

on so the theater has to do

most of the negotiations for the audience that's too

bad but writing and reading are the same

thing same idea

and there's a huge difference between a good writer

and a bad writer for these

reasons so let's think of communication

as an extension of the gesture

so what could two different computers have in common

well could be something like the dynamic messaging

of real objectoriented

programming could be something like what Linda

did but with David gar her we

still have the problem of real aliens but let's look

at the problem with the

person people and computer what

could they have in common

and

so

what can we make that is going to beam the

audience's intelligence and knowledge back out

them what should we put on the

stage

and so the guoy is a representation of

what the computer is thinking about

in a form that humans can uh

understand the human can

actually gesture at the

topic that he wants to talk

about each window holds a

context and is a topic for conversation all the possible

conversation are active no modes

undoing is critical everywhere gesturing and

dragging and J Eng gauges the body

brain pictures are more memorable than

words so use those doing with images make

symbols and this is kind of Jerome Bruner

101 this one is particularly

important okay so

this is kind of

a summary

of the way

people were thinking back then

and if you think about the park

guey of all the things that

this research community did back then

the thing that made the trillion ion dollar

Industries was not just Mo's

law because

there was nobody to sell Mo's law or

even any reason to do Mo's law

at the scale it which was done unless

millions and billions of people could actually use this stuff and

reason millions and billions of people can use the stuff

is because of the invention of the

guy

okay so

I don't even know what time it is

but um I'm up to the

dot dot dot question about what my greatest

aha Etc was and but I'm gonna pause

here and just check in with

Lenny

hello um

how long how long was that by the way uh we

are uh we uh we still have time so

if you have uh

okay so um

the so now now the choice

uh uh can get

a another question from the audience we can

do this dot dot dot thing whatever you'd

like um we have one

question so Len

was this uh was this recognizable to you

oh my god totally I mean there anecdotes all

over the presentation that would add to it

but you nailed it beautifully you captured that

there and the characters

and the uh mix between

highly Cooperative groups and

individual working on their own

things happen there's a lot of individual

yet the group action came in

and out in and out it was an interest it wasn't

pure you know one versus many

it was so

I think I forgot to mention was uh that

I don't think uh lick intended it or maybe

he did but uh what turned out to be the

messenger uh mechanism

and there happened to be graduate students and interns

including you for example

I mean I flew 140,000 miles as a

grad student Dave Evans had a huge budget

for airplane travel for his grad

students well Steve managed

to basically bankrupt mine

doing the same thing yeah because you gota

these and and ARP I should have mentioned

that arpa in uh

1968 funded the first arpa

graduate student conference which was modeled

on the arpa contractors meetings

that's another story about how that happened but

uh that was really great because uh things went

in the amount of intercommunication

and Trust because a lot

about trust and

yet it was not um what shall I

say a

a bowl of soup it was contentious

in a positive way I'll give you one example

we had this principal investigators meeting John McCarthy

arrived about 20 minutes late someone was presenting

minutes later McCarthy raised his hand and says excuse

me I have no idea what you're talking about

he says but I was late

however if I came in in time I still think I with no idea

what you're talking about B can imagine your interaction

was wonderful yeah I should have

that the one of the main things I learned in grad school

and everybody at Park knew was

uh that the purpose of arguing is not to win

but to to illuminate

and uh in fact when people started getting

he in an argument Taylor would

say type two type two

and a type two argument was all

sudden you had to explain the other person's position

back to them until they agreed with

it and then they had to explain your

position back to you until you agreed with it and by

happened you'd forgotten what you're arguing about and

you okay let's go to the question

all right we have a question here yeah hello

um and I I agree and I guess I kind of apologize

for the uh structure

that we have because it does impose any limitations on the

discussion um I'm on on the faculty

too so uh but

you know faculty meetings uh there's too

much contention because the stakes are too

low I

quit going um so I have two questions which are

a little related um so so number

one was

do you think and and maybe you'll agree that

there's kind of been a split between the

practicers of technology which are the software engineers

and the systems thinkers who are like the theoreticians

and the inventors um if so why

any suggestions to remediate this uh

also asking to Professor kleinrock if he has any

input on that and my second question is probably a little

related um which is what are your

thoughts on I guess all of this

development most like a lot of it has been going into private

research Labs like Google X and Microsoft

research um do do you think it's still kind of

analogous to Bell labs in back in the

day uh no

B for instance at Bell Labs

if you walked around back before

the divesture uh you

that would say

either do something very useful or very

beautiful

I've never seen a sign like that at

research okay so

because that's a pro that's a huge

problem I

guess go ahead yeah go ahead oh no I guess I have a follow-up

question to that which is uh you mentioned a bit earlier in the talk

one of the questions I sent over which is uh do you think

younger people have a harder problem these days in you know living

in this more materialistic world world so

to speak yeah you know

just just one example I I was

at Park in Palo Alto and

um

the general inflation has been about

a factor of seven since then

or so and when I

factor that into the salary I got at Park it's about what

I would get just you

know I was just a year out of grad school when I went to park

so uh really uh not a

huge wasn't a lot of money but

with today

however I was able to buy a house in

paloalto uh right near

Park and it only cost twice my yearly

salary

okay that house has inflated

by a factor of 70 not seven

so then do you go go ahead

go ahead so the uh

so if Park existed today

uh none of us

and and Taylor wanted to hire he only hired older

people uh from the arpa community

as advisers

he didn't want I was the oldest person there and I

was 30 he didn't

he wanted a new know he wanted the researchers that ARA

had Jed out there and he used

the uh the generation before us as as advisers

and so if

if I if they had tried to set this

up uh somebody would have had to

buy a lot of housing in Palo Alo

and you know when when Google is being

set up and when HP was being set up I said hey look

at Stanford Stanford figured this out a long time ago

because if you get an associate professorship at

Stanford one of the perks is a 99-year

lease at a very low interest rate

on Stanford land for a house

and Stanford was owns a lot

houses in Palo Alta they bought them up before the Big

Deck companies got there because they

understood that people have a life might

not be much of a life outside the lab but they still got

one by the way

Lan will love the the story that

metf and bogs had the record

longest period uh

inside of Park without leaving it

which uh during the critical period of the

the ethernet which was two and a half

months they had a

cafeteria you know it had plenty of places you could sleep

it had showers

um wasn't wasn't that helpful on

if you had a marriage that didn't

get this idea uh

they would suffer but yeah so to so

the the a big problem today and and you know

I run run various

kinds of I've been able to fund until

about I don't know five six years ago I was able to fund

a nonprofit research thing that

was about to size of the group I had at Park

and uh and to get people who are

as good as the people I had at Park

but it wasn't the same as Park similarly

Butler Lamson and Chuck ther went with deck

initially and then with

Microsoft and it wasn't the same as park

because they

uh you know for example

my habit when when I would get confused

about something was to go down and have

Butler tear it to shreds

and I miss missmiss

being able to just walk down the hall into

that crystallin Palace of his

mind and you could

never top Butler on the same

least I couldn't but Butler

was an was honest if you came back three days

later and said now here is the real point

you would say you're

right so that's a really great C it's a

genius there's no question he's one of the most brilliant

people I've ever met and an honest

genius and a guy who by the way

helped my group whenever he could

despite the fact that our theory of programming language

design was quite different from

his he didn't give a about

that so he was Butler was a big man

in my opinion just a big fantastic

so it's that Synergy

it's what happens in the

halls and it's

what happens when you're having like

EP uh

you know how how many beer beer Laden lunches

do you have how many bike rides up to the top

of the uh the hills around

Palo Alto with all these people no

there's a whole whole thing there that is going to

pay off by

what the group is willing to do and reason I kept on

showing theater is

arpa at its best park at its best was like

theater at its best you've got the most diverse

group of people you ever saw

some of which some of whom can't even

stand each other

but the whole point of the thing is

audience that's going to be there

six weeks from now or six months

from now and

so you get this thing where people

work 24 hours a day and they just find

ways to solve everything they

do the woo woo on the leftand side that's

what theater is about and they

do all of the stuff you have to do in the physical

world to make it work and

know if you don't have those and

if they don't like Len did

this if those people don't have some of

the other in them to have this shared context

there has to be a place where you go and it's

the love of what you're gonna

get the audience to try to think about

because you can't tell the audience

anything can't people only remember

you make them feel

so so you have to lay it this is why I

all these pictures and stuff because I want the pictures

to do things you can't do in regular

words and

yeah so the question is

uh the way I look

at playing the blame game

here is businesses

are in a terrible position

fidu in a fiduciary responsibility way

for doing the kind of stuff that arpa

and park did they have every

and especially the Milton Freedman American businesses

which are a terrible way to do business in

general there you know Peter Dreer used to say

that that business's main obligation

is to their uh customers

and Milton fredman said no business's

main obligation is to their stockholders

and that has turned really ugly that

is really ugly so but in any case

good or bad they're in a bad place for it

uh research can only be

xpensed eeks

you could be sitting on a ton of cash tough

comes out of the bottom

line so so when I when

I look there I Look to society and

government part of the idea

of getting people to pay

taxes is to deal with things

in a way that is hard for

scattered groups to deal with with or without

engelbart stuff and I think the

the woo woo research stuff done

right is one of those things and I just happened

to stumble into it I didn't go to

Utah knowing anything about arpa I'd never heard of arpa

I just stumbled in there by by and

chance and I found out I was in Paradise

because

and the dod was doing fine because

uh arpa ipto cost almost nothing compared to

the the whole DOD

budget it was just fingernail clipping so it's the perfect

place for doing this

uh enlightened public

domain uh research and you had the ultimate

enlightened public domain mind in lick

to do that the key thing

Park was that Taylor loved

lick he he was a psychologist

also he truly loved

lick and I'll I'll

finish in one second Jason and he

uh

he studied lick so lick

was intu

intuition he had great inter but Taylor

codified lick those rules

put up there were not Lick's rules but Taylor's

rules and anytime you wanted to park you could

go and lie on the floor in Taylor's office we we were floor culture

we had thick carpets that were

padding underneath so you could just roll around on the floor we had bean

bags and inste of chairs so you go

there and lie in there for an hour and let Taylor tell

you what he was why he was doing what he was doing at

Park and it was mostly these rules

I wrote down you got to do this you got to do that

uh etc etc like

okay so um

yeah so I point I point my finger

at the government and if you point your finger at the government you

have to point your finger at the

uh uh the American

Body politic and if you point your finger at them you have

to point your finger at education

public education if you point your finger at publication

public education you point your finger at the government

again so the government has not

done its job and by the way over here in London in

the UK it's it's worse

uh the politicians are a little nicer over here

but they're equally uh incompetent

they just don't do not understand and

their financial base is much smaller over here

so they're in more desperate need

of the kind of Industries they can afford

that actually work in the 21st century

need this um

yeah so uh but when

after the government

should be doing this that and the other thing

I I can't get far from the educ

from the University because the university used to be the co

the flame the whole

point there was

the universities were not beholden to

business their job was not to do job

training in obsolete software

systems to deal with business's

problems with Legacy systems that is not the job

university that's a trade school and there's nothing

I love trade schools the high school I

went to was a was a one you had to take

a test to get into but it was a glorified trade school Lenny

will tell you and uh I learned a lot

there but Jesus the

universities have got to uphold

something like the way the 21st century

should be for the students or the students

are just going to go there and buy degrees in order

to get jobs that is my general

picture so the university

could put us you know I when I was active

around UCLA at some faculty

meeting uh

maybe more than one

I brought up the idea hey wait a minute UCLA is one of the

top 10 schools and uh

there are other top 10 schools in the nation

in the University of California

you know basically you

know why are we letting the

Regents determine that tenure

uh re requires paper

counting

UCLA should be able to say well you know Screw You

Regents screw you and

Davis and uh San Diego

and Santa Barbara screw you Regents

we're not going to do it that way

we're not gonna count papers for Christ's

sake you know

if you got to count a paper you at least have to put a weight on it

and it's hard to put a weight on a paper until 10 years

have passed you

just can't do it that way or you're going to turn it into

a Job Shop and

uh you know uh I pointed out

to the UCLA faculty that because of

you know the the discussion was wow

our department is really popular now we've got more

students than we can handle I said well godamn it

if you got that that's what the bean counters

in the University care

about is retention because it's money

you've got them just say

okay all right

we're going to do tenure differently we're going to hire

differently we're going to have a different set of Standards

here

or we're just goingon to uh you know etc

etc but the 60s were

long over by the time I made that

stand

okay next question

I have a question yes

this

was sorry

this was a and I've heard you many

times and always I I recognize

this accent always

yes I'm ready I'm ready

I'm ready always very entertaining

and uh thoughtful

but I I feel there is now

a huge crra a

Gap uh which we didn't you didn't

would be nice if you could have a thought or address

which is everything in the past

seems to me have to do let's

call it with mathematics has

Precision prob language is not

we talk it has precision

and suddenly I think the new

Queen the new the new thing in the helm

the new Revolution is is

without Precision it's without

and we built machine that we do not

understand how they work but

they work they perform they

perform not in Precision

you know if there will be a a self-driving

car it will kill somebody there is no question you

cannot guarantee that this will not happen

it's a new thing and

I feel most of us here on this list

on the nine people that are left

we are dinosaurs of the past

and what do you have any thoughts about

this well uh

just by chance in the late 60s

I was visiting MIT and there was a meeting

of DOD people with

uh the AI people at MIT

and I think mensky was saying

you know in a few years we might be able to do what a dog can

do and uh the fourstar

general said a dog

he said look we don't even want what ordinary humans can

do we can draft them we've got two million

robots in the in the Department of Defense already

we train them and they learn well and

they carry guns and they do all the stuff that we want

we already got intelligent robots we need

superhuman intelligence that's what

we need and

so I

I don't want to start a long discussion about

you know but it happens that the

what J Judea Pearl calls curve

fitting machine learning

uh as you know

also very well goes all the way back

20 30 40 years

or 50 years or more Minsky's

thesis was actually one of the first perceptrons

so the idea of

of finding complex

transfer functions between lots of inputs and

fewer outputs is has been around for a while

and uh it's definitely a a

big component of what's going on inside of our

brains but

the I I think

the we should ask

more for example uh

I wouldn't want to use an

AI that

couldn't be vetted in

some way and of

course uh the chat Bots

uh can lie whenever it suits them

and by the way I just saw that uh

uh open AI chatbot

has recently gone nuts

which is really fun track this down

it started something went wrong and it's now it's mostly

hallucinating so these are

like human beings these are creators

that's what we are that's what we

got inside there and I believe that

we're we're better than we

were 100,000 years ago mainly

because we invented

methods for thinking

the big one being science

math allows you to in a consistent

way but it

it doesn't have any necessary connection to

reality where science wants to be able

to do uh

crisp thinking in a way that is anchored to

reality such that the uh the

cues might have something to do with reality also

I think that is a very very good thing I think it would help

our politics on both sides of the lanic

tremendously if uh schools started

teaching CH basically doing what engelbart

said we have to insert better methods

than the ones we were born with or

simple uh large language models

have uh in order to

uh be able to use them in

any reasonable way that's my my

answer

got it got it and then we also have one more

question from the audience um I wanted to get a chance to

yeah have him ask hi professor Kate thank you

for your talk today um I'm born in the 21st century

so my uh I guess

thoughts about zorx Park is the only one I know of

Steve Jobs's visit where he commercializes

the guey that you guys invented into the apple one

so I was

yeah so what he saw was what

what he saw was what we did

he visited it was a visit to my

group uh and I was in the

room uh during that visit

and the demo we gave him and

uh we became friends uh partly

as the result of that visit so

ask me any question you want to ask about that

visit uh yeah I mean my first question was going

if you happen to be in the room at all but now I know

uh second of all would be Steve had or

Mr jobs uh had a way of combining design

and pushing the boundaries of engineering through that I

was wondering how Zero's or

the Park's attitude towards pushing research

um the boundaries of research were or what

influence so

the so let me answer it's a two-part

question so one part uh is

early in the 80s I said to both Steve

and Bill Gates uh

this is during the controversy of whether apple and

Microsoft had stolen the ideas from

Xerox and

you know I told I said to both of them I said

look we want this we want you to steal the

ideas but for Christ's sake steal

whole idea don't steal a protest

caricature yeah the whole

yeah that's why I say the the disappointing figures

that I put there was the amount of actual

takeup uh so the second thing is that

what Steve was

uh he was NE say the two words you said again designer

and a pusher of

engineering yeah right okay so

Steve was not a designer

and he was a pusher of

people so the key thing about Steve

was that he had a lot of good

woowoo

so where he picked up

he could feel the fireflies if he'd been a scientist

it would have been much better for

everybody because as he said and there's a famous

interview you can find on YouTube where

Steve says he says when I first went to Xerox

I was so blinded by the user interface I couldn't see anything

else I couldn't see object-oriented programming I

see the networks he had to

wait until he did next years later when he ran into

another contingent from the old Arbor Community

to explain to them why you why you need

those but we he didn't

understand how the stuff and we couldn't tell

him uh we were

able to show him uh like one of the famous

things that happened in the demo

my my one of my favorite demo things and if I had had time

because we recreated that system just for the shits

of it so it actually runs the system that we showed

him and um I occasionally will'll do

it live in a talk um

but Steve had two complaints while he was and

he was really watching he

had his acolytes around him

uh but Steve Steve was really paying

attention to the thing and he

said you know

I don't like You' never seen a scroll bar before but he

didn't like the fact that as you pulled it it

went line by line he

says can't that go be done

continuously and Dan Engles who was giving the demo

because small talk is live

I mean live down to the operating systems so

Dan was able to do a couple of Clips

here's where the slow scroll bar thing is

uh change a line of code

quar a second later things are scrolling

smoothly and later on

uh when we were showing text

selection um we liked

we tried a lot of different ways of doing it but we' like the

complimenting the characters

which is what basically is done

today uh and Steve didn't like that he said

can't you do an outline

around the you know he's right because it's comp

and white complimenting

is a little bit too in your face

face so he's right there

and so my jaw was on the

floor because Dan Engles went in there

that was not a trivial thing you know because if

you think of the selection

you have to find the actual boundary of the selection and

you have to uh

treat it the right way and Dan went right to the

thing and basically what he did was to

just take the code that comp mented

copy it and shift the

coordinates of the comp of the second

complementation uh diagonally

by two

so you get to so what it would do in it before you could see it would do

compliment then it would shift diagonally do another compliment

and that would leave a a black line around the selection

just what Steve asked for it's like one of

the greatest things I've ever seen done unprepared

in a demo in a program progamming system in my

life that was uh

1979 yeah so that was uh

good and

uh uh Apple didn't steal

you know Apple did do a great thing

as the ba from the basis of that

stuff uh which was the Lisa

done before the mac

and the Lisa was done

uh with Park people who are

hired

uh uh and with

some very smart people who are at Apple like Bill

ainson and the Lisa was

really nice it was the best thing you

could possibly do for that day was

done on a 68,000

microprocessor which meant an enormous amount

of programming for to do the graphics that were so easy

on the alto but they did it and it was really

great and uh a system

you would die for you could get

for 10,000

bucks and $10,000 happen to

be the average price of a car new car in the United

States at that time um sorry to interrupt

we're almost at the top of the second hour uh

of the of the talk so almost at the end of the second hour of

the talk um so I just want to get a quick chance for people who have

class um but first please Round of Applause for our

speaker for the people who are

left yeah

so I

love I I just expected

uh that you would have you would give me

one of your uh Barbed

comments I love

those

okay thank you thank you than you one and all

thank you for thank you thank

you Alan thank you so much yeah but don't

don't use your car while you're driving Glen

well I had to meet Stella she's waiting for me

and for an hour and now so sorry I had to step

out that's good you listen to

Marvin

of course happy wife happy

life uh the number one

that's rule zero

not that's not even rule one that's rule

zero you got it you got it

thank you very much again Alan thank you thanks

so much Allan

thank you bye bye

Difference between revisions of "Alan Kay talk at UCLA CS Connection Lab"

Latest revision as of 01:37, 27 February 2024

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