Hi --

Well, that was the general idea -- our research community back then 
(ARPA/ONR/PARC) was concerned with both scaling and the transition 
from "making" to "growing". The Internet is another research result 
from that community, and it and the kind of objects that I tried to 
characterize were both formed at the same time in the same context -- 
both were "biological" on purpose (my background was in Molecular 
Biology as well as Math).

By the way, one of the inspirations for this notion of "living 
organism" came from "BBN Lisp 1.85", (Bobrow, Deutsch, Teitelmann, et 
al.) which later became Interlisp. Smalltalk was already going by 
then and there was quite a lot of crossfertilization. Simply put, you 
should use the strongest thing you have to make stronger things, and 
this means that the programming system should participate strongly in 
its own improvement.

However, Dan Ingalls gets the main credit for actually making this stuff work.

Going back earlier in the 60s we find Peter Deutsch's PDP-1 Lisp 
which had quite an influence on me (and the Flex machine language and 
system I was trying to make in grad school). This was what got me 
thinking that an operating system is just a stupid programming system 
and the former should be replaced by a smart programming system made 
from objects. As Dan Ingalls used to say: "An operating system is 
just the stuff left out of the programming language -- if you don't 
leave it out, then you don't need the OS".

(But what do you think Hofstadter and Penrose would contribute here 
40 years after the fact?)

Cheers,

Alan

At 11:13 PM 5/20/2007, subbukk wrote:
>On Saturday 19 May 2007 11:06 pm, Alan Kay wrote:
> > Dan and I have joked that there is probably at least one line of code
> > I wrote for class Paragraph still there. (I did the original version
> > in ST-72 -- a one -pager -- but it has been added to and etc., many
> > times since by others.)
>If objects had a creation timestamp, then historians would have had a field
>day :-).
>
>I find it amazing that there is no 'reset' for the program counter. The pc in
>the images we use today has been 'ticking' since 1970s spanning across image
>suspend/resume, across image replications, across image bootstraps on new
>platforms and so on. This makes an image a living digital organism. It comes
>alive on a VM, takes in code mutations, replicates itself, records the ideas
>of its operators and even colonizes new territories (with external
>assistance). With Croquet, it can even reach out to other images and form a
>close-knit communities.
>
>I wonder what Roger Penrose or Doug Hofstadter would say about Squeak .. Subbu