The printing press was one of the most influential inventions in human history. Could universal personal computing and worldwide networking be just as significant to human thought? In the 1960s, the Advanced Research Projects Agency (ARPA) established a research community to accomplish that grand goal.
Quite a bit of this dream was realized in the 1970s by the extension of this community at the Xerox Palo Alto Research Center (PARC) sparked by ideas from Alan Kay, Butler Lampson, Chuck Thacker, Bob Taylor, and others. These research teams were a valuable part of Kay’s professional career.
The PARC team created Alto, the forerunner of today’s personal computers (PCs). It was an outgrowth of Kay’s 1968 Dynabook concept, a compact notebook using a tablet and keyboard, a flatscreen display, a graphical user interface (GUI), and wireless networking. Kay wanted Dynabook to be a PC for children of all ages.
Kay and his fellow PARC members were pioneers in objectoriented programming (OOP), GUI windows, bit-mapped graphics, prototypes of networked workstations, the Ethernet, Internet, laser printing, and other factors that subsequently were adopted by Apple Computer, Microsoft, and the rest of the quickly growing PC and networking industry.
“Building on the previous research generation, we created a new kind of medium for boosting human thought, for amplifying human intellectual endeavor. We thought it could be as significant as Gutenberg’s invention of the printing press 500 years ago. We hoped that it would boost civilization a couple of notches the way the printing press did,” Kay said.
“The press first made the Reformation in the 16th century possible, but this was not really the qualitative change in human thought that occurred a century later,” explained Kay. “The printing press created both a way to spread ideas around and to argue about ideas in a new way. Computers and networks not just spread ideas around but allowed new ideas to be thinkable because of the unique representation properties of computers themselves.”
Kay added, “Nothing prevents unsophisticated people from trying to recreate commercial television on computers, as many commercial interests are trying to do. This is looking backwards and downwards. But looking forward and upward, the computer has revolutionized science, just as was done by the printing press. The majority of all science being done today could not be done without the computer. It is enabling people to do things they could not do before, but it may take several more generations to affect the general population.”
THE SPARK
What was the catalyst that started Kay thinking about these revolutionary computer tools? “I think part was being a grad student in the ARPA community, part a kind of laziness coupled with aesthetic,” he said. He’d been a graduate student only five or six days when he was given Ivan Sutherland’s thesis on the invention of computer graphics and simultaneously tasked to get a system going, which turned out to be the first Simula, on the university computer.
“Seeing them one after the other, I realized both of those two things shared something in common. They were both almost like biological cells and almost like little computers communicating,” said Kay.
“Because I didn’t have to go to class, I was completely relaxed. Often insight comes in such unguarded moments. I realized if I just changed these concepts a little, they would resemble something really powerful. When later asked what I was doing, I said ‘object-oriented programming.’ In retrospect I should have picked a much better term.”
Kay had two majors when the OOP concept appeared to him—biology and math—and that knowledge intermingled in his brain. He had seen a few programs that “were almost OOP,” he said.
“One reminded me of molecular biology. Each body has 100 trillion cells and they each have 60 billion components interacting informationally. It just clicked that if you could get computers to do what cells do, it would be a much better way of scaling things. It would vastly cut down the amount of effort and number of concepts you have to deal with separately in a computer. I really had a flash about it,” said Kay.
But it took nearly five years before he and his team could build an object-oriented program system to prove their ideas were as powerful as they thought they were. “When people saw the demos, they just couldn’t believe it,” he said.
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