(2012-07-10) Kay Interview

Andrew Binstock interviews Alan Kay.

Binstock: Let me start by asking you about a famous story. It states that you'd read more than 100 books by the time you went to first grade. This reading enabled you to realize that your teachers were frequently lying to you.

• Kay: Yeah. But the thing that traumatized me occurred a couple years later, when I found an old copy of Life magazine that had the Margaret Bourke-White photos from Buchenwald (holocaust). This was in the 1940s — no TV, living on a farm. That's when I realized that adults were dangerous. Like, really dangerous. I forgot about those pictures for a few years, but I had nightmares. But I had forgotten where the images came from. Seven or eight years later, I started getting memories back in snatches, and I went back and found the magazine. That probably was the turning point that changed my entire attitude toward life. It was responsible for getting me interested in education. My interest in Education is unglamorous. I don't have an enormous desire to help children, but I have an enormous desire to create better adults.

Binstock: You once referred to computing as pop culture.

• Kay: It is. Complete pop culture. I'm not against pop culture. Developed music, for instance, needs a pop culture. There's a tendency to over-develop. Brahms and Dvorak needed gypsy music badly by the end of the 19th century. The big problem with our culture is that it's being dominated, because the electronic media we have is so much better suited for transmitting pop-culture content than it is for high-culture content... But pop culture holds a disdain for history. Pop culture is all about identity and feeling like you're participating. It has nothing to do with cooperation, the past or the future — it's living in the present. I think the same is true of most people who write code for money. They have no idea where [their culture came from] — and 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 World Wide Web, in comparison, is a joke. The Web was done by amateurs.

Binstock: Well, look at Wikipedia — it's a tremendous collaboration.

• Kay: It is, but go to the article on Logo, can you write and execute Logo programs (computational medium)? Are there examples? No. The Wikipedia people didn't even imagine that, in spite of the fact that they're on a computer. That's why I never use MsPowerpoint. MsPowerpoint is just simulated acetate overhead slides, and to me, that is a kind of a Moral crime... Go to a blog, go to any Wiki, and find one that's WYSIWYG like MsWord is. Word was done in 1974. HyperCard was 1989. Find me Web pages that are even as good as HyperCard. The Web was done after that, but it was done by people who had no imagination. They were just trying to satisfy an immediate need. There's nothing wrong with that, except that when you have something like the Industrial Revolution squared, you wind up setting de facto standards — in this case, really bad de facto standards. Because what you definitely don't want in a Web Browser is any features... You want to get those from the objects. You want it to be a mini-OperatingSystem, and the people who did the browser mistook it as an application. They flunked Operating Systems 101... The flaw there is probably the fact that C is early-bound... Because they did it that way, you wind up with megabytes of features that are essentially bundled together whether you want them or not. And now a thousand system calls, where what you really want is objects that are migrating around the net, and when you need a resource, it comes to you — no operating system. We didn't use an operating system at PARC. We didn't have applications either.
• (maybe if OpenDoc had succeeded...)