A change in perspective is worth 80 IQ points.
--Alan Kay
A successful technology creates problems that only it can solve.
--Alan Kay
Actually I made up the term 'object-oriented,' and I can tell you I did not have C++ in mind.
--Alan Kay
An important technology first creates a problem and then solves it.
--Alan Kay
Any company large enough to have a research lab is too large to listen to it.
--Alan Kay
Any medium powerful enough to extend man's reach is powerful enough to topple his world. To get the medium's magic to work for one's aims rather than against them is to attain literacy.
--Alan Kay
Change is easy, except for the changed part.
--Alan Kay
Every technology really needs to be shipped with a special manual- not how to use it but why, when and for what.
--Alan Kay
Having an intelligent secretary does not get rid of the need to read, write, and draw, etc. In a well functioning world, tools and agents are complementary.
--Alan Kay
I don't have an enormous desire to help children, but I have an enormous desire to create better adults.
--Alan Kay
I like to say that in the old days, if you reinvented the wheel, you would get your wrist slapped for not reading. But nowadays people are reinventing the flat tire.
--Alan Kay
If you don't fail at least 90 percent of the time, you're not aiming high enough.
--Alan Kay
In success there's a tendency to keep on doing what you were doing.
--Alan Kay
Knowledge is silver. Outlook is gold. IQ is a lead weight.
--Alan Kay
Most creativity is a transition from one context into another where things are more surprising.
--Alan Kay
Most software today is very much like an Egyptian pyramid with millions of bricks piled on top of each other, with no structural integrity, but just done by brute force and thousands of slaves.
--Alan Kay
Most undergraduate degrees in computer science these days are basically Java vocational training.
--Alan Kay
Our job is to remind us that there are more contexts than the one that we're in- the one that we think is reality.
--Alan Kay
People who are really serious about software should make their own hardware.
--Alan Kay
PowerPoint is just simulated acetate overhead slides, and to me, that is a kind of a moral crime.
--Alan Kay
Quite a few people have to believe something is normal before it becomes normal- a sort of voting situation. But once the threshold is reached, then everyone demands to do whatever it is.
--Alan Kay
School is basically about one point of view- the one the teacher has or the textbooks have. They don't like the idea of having different points of view...
--Alan Kay
Simple things should be simple, complex things should be possible.
--Alan Kay
Some people worry that artificial intelligence will make us feel inferior, but then, anybody in his right mind should have an inferiority complex every time he looks at a flower.
--Alan Kay
Technology is anything that wasn't around when you were born.
--Alan Kay
Television should be the last mass communication medium to be naively designed and put into the world without a surgeon-general's warning.
--Alan Kay
The best way to predict the future is to invent it. Really smart people with reasonable funding can do just about anything that doesn't violate too many of Newton's Laws.
--Alan Kay
The biggest problem we have as human beings is that we confuse our beliefs with reality.
--Alan Kay
The computer revolution hasn't started yet. Don't be misled by the enormous flow of money into bad defacto standards for unsophisticated buyers using poor adaptations of incomplete ideas.
--Alan Kay
The future is not laid out on a track. It is something that we can decide, and to the extent that we do not violate any known laws of the universe, we can probably make it work the way that we want to.
--Alan Kay
The Internet was done so well that most people think of it as a natural resource like the Pacific Ocean, rather than something that was man-made. When was the last time a technology with a scale like that was so error-free? The Web, in comparison, is a joke. The Web was done by amateurs.
--Alan Kay
The most disastrous thing that you can ever learn is your first programming language.
--Alan Kay
The protean nature of the computer is such that it can act like a machine or like a language to be shaped and exploited.
--Alan Kay
The real romance is out ahead and yet to come. The computer revolution hasn't started yet.
--Alan Kay
Found 34 occurence(s) in 52,059 quotation(s).