Alan Kay and the Conference on Software Pioneers

Alan Kay Alan.Kay at squeakland.org
Fri Oct 18 13:06:05 UTC 2002


Yep, too bad about this. The conference was terrific. It was 
sponsored by a german consulting company for its employees, and that 
year they decided to invite "software pioneers". I was actually a bit 
out of place there since they invited many of the folks I consider 
the *real pioneers* who were "one generation or two" before me. They 
were the people I learned from. For example, I was thrilled to meet 
again after many years Fritz "Papa" Bauer who (with Samuelsen) 
actually wrote the first paper on the stack and how to use it for 
parsing (I think this paper was published in 1957!). He was 
absolutely hale and hearty. Nygaard and Dahl were there. Dijkstra was 
there, etc. Klaus Wirth was there (he is more of a contemporary as 
far as age, but was already doing really cool things at Berkeley and 
Stanford as I was getting started.

But they had a terrible display system (a composite system of smaller 
real projectors) and no way  to darken the hall, plus only one camera 
(I think) so they just didn't get a good record. It might be worth it 
to splice in the movies etc to that talk. However, notice how long it 
took them to get the book out. This stuff takes a long time and I'm 
still busy doing "real stuff". At some point I'll make good my 
promise to put this stuff out in a coherent form.

Cheers,

Alan

At 5:55 AM -0400 10/18/02, Rick Zaccone wrote:
>Our Library just got a copy of the book "Software Pioneers:
>Contributions to Software Engineering", Manfred Broy and Ernst Denert
>(Eds.), Springer.  This book is a collection of talks given at the
>Software Pioneers conference, June 28-29, 2001.  It comes with 4
>DVDs.
>
>I turned to the chapter on Alan Kay and noticed that there were just
>two pages devoted to him.  (There is an incorrect e-mail address and
>it says that he is at Disney).  It also says this:
>
>     Alan Kay presented the history of man-machine interfaces, in
>     particular graphical user interfaces.  His lecture gained its
>     vividness mainly from demonstrations and several historical
>     videos.  This is hardly reproducible in a paper.  Therefore, we
>     refer the reader to the DVD recording of Alan Kay's talk (DVD
>     no. 2).
>
>I eagerly inserted the DVD into my computer.  What a disappointment!
>The talk was very good, but it wasn't possible to see what was going
>on in any of the video demos!  The person taking the video didn't get
>any close shots of the screen.  I think he was using Squeak for part
>of his demo, but it was hard to tell for sure.
>
>I was hoping to finally see some of Alan's videos, especially after
>the introduction that the book gave.  Has anyone else been
>disappointed by this?  Alan mentioned a video that he was putting
>together for the computer museum.  Is it available?
>
>Rick Zaccone


-- 



More information about the Squeak-dev mailing list