This was just one part of the team’s innovations. Kay and the 25 team members were responsible for seven seminal technologies: the PC, bit-map screen, WYSIWYG GUI, Ethernet, OOP, part of the Internet, and laser printing. It was a complete vision of personal computing that reflects how people use PCs today.
Past, Present, and future
Kay’s attentions also focus on music, specifically jazz and the baroque pipe organ. After many years of playing solely the pipe organ, Kay is returning to his first musical love. He was a professional jazz guitarist in his high school and college days, and he has picked up that guitar once again.
“I recently heard a group, the Phil Norman Tentet, that completely knocked me off my chair. They are so everything that I like about music. I just conceived this powerful urge to start playing guitar after more than 40 years of not playing guitar at all. Now I’m practicing a couple hours on guitar and one hour a day on the baroque pipe organ.”
It doesn’t take long when talking to Kay to realize that he has a vast knowledge of the world, which he attributes to being a truly avid reader. “I’ve probably read more than 10,000 books in my life. As a child, I read hundreds of books every year,” he explained.
“Dad was a physiologist, mom an artist and musician. I grew up in a houseful of books. I was interested in everything, especially how ‘the hip bone was connected to the thigh bone.’ I was actually more interested in science than engineering. The latter was kind of a hobby. It was fun to build things,” he said.
“Many people today don’t have a great interest in reading. Unfortunately, this is also true of my field of computing,” said Kay. “More progress could be made if details of other projects were studied.”
Many of the technical challenges facing those in the computer field today have already been solved, said Kay, but “people don’t know it because they don’t read. They are re-inventing the flat tire. It goes on all the time. Then there’s a bunch of problems that have to do with scale and expressability that have never been solved.”
Team research today
Kay is now president of Viewpoints Research Institute, a nonprofit organization he created in 2001 to develop powerful ideas to improve worldwide student education, as well as to advance systems research and personal computing. It is an active leader in the One Laptop Per Child (OLCP) initiative striving to make $100 laptops for every child.
“Our Etoys educational authoring environment for children runs on 100 different platforms and uses 30 to 40 different language groups. The OLCP laptop can hold hundreds of books much more cheaply than paper and can withstand inclement climates much better, plus it can do new things only computers can do,” said Kay.
Viewpoints Research Institute has on a smaller scale the research process that was so successful in the large research groups of the 1950s and 1960s. Such research labs died when funding dried up. VPRI, said Kay, gives researchers a chance to try many ideas and have many failures to find the most fruitful new directions for qualitative advances. It could be just what’s needed for the development of totally new inventions that will move the worldwide economy forward.
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