[EXTRA! EXTRA!]Alan Kay article in ComputerSweden

goran.hultgren at bluefish.se goran.hultgren at bluefish.se
Wed Dec 11 08:46:55 UTC 2002


When I came in to work this morning and picked up today's issue of
ComputerSweden (http://computersweden.idg.se - Alan's pretty face on the
frontpage!:-)) there is a full spread article about Alan Kay.

ComputerSweden is a 2 issues per week "tabloid" (I think that is the
name of it) paper which has grown into the premier "quality gossip" IT
paper here in Sweden. It has been getting better, in the beginning it
was a bit full of "this company bought that company" etc but today it is
actually quite good.

The article is very good and has a lot of stuff in it (see below) - but:
1. It is in Swedish
2. You need to subscribe to the paper to be able to read it online

Apparently Alan was awarded as an "honorary doctor" at the Royal
Institute of Technology (http://www.kth.se/eng/about/) in november this
year for his work with children. He also visited and gave a lecture I
think (Hmmm, why did I miss that?). This is probably the reason for the
article.

List of stuff in article:

- Full "Alan Kay history line" including a reference to "Open Croquet"!
I quote: "How would the graphical interface look if we forgot how it has
looked since 1970 and developed it from scratch for the computers of our
time?" No url though so you guys can relax! :-)

- Short "mini article answers" about "The birth of the Internet", "Xerox
Parc", "Java", "Smalltalk", "The failure of Xerox to market their
inventions", "Computers in school", "Level of education in the US",
"Ivan Sutherland's sketchpad from 1962", "Doug Engelbarts demo from
1968"

- A BIG picture of Alan. :-)

- A picture of one of the "car tutorials" in EToy.

- A rather long article focusing on children education and education in
general, education using computers and teaching mathematics to children.

Obviously the article is based on an in-depth interview with Alan and is
full of quotes, quite interesting. No factual errors at all as I can
see.

Hey Alan? It also seems that perhaps you knew that the article wouldn't
be read by many americans. :-) Well, you others will just have to ask me
for more details on those parts. ;-)

The only thing bothering me a bit with the article is that Squeak is
presented purely as a tool for teaching children. That doesn't really
make it easier for me to present Squeak as a viable tool "industry
software development tool" for my swedish clients... at the same time I
understand that Alan can't get into the details in this kind of article.

regards, Göran




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