He's the closest we have in our field to Newton, if you look where 
things were when he started and where knowledge was when he finished 
-- maybe the bigest jump ever -- combine this with LISP which was 
already a few years old and you have an enormous  amount -- combine 
this with Barton's B5000 (ca 1961, the original high level language 
byte coded machine and .....

Too bad most programmers still don't understand today what Ivan and 
others understood by 1963 (or course we could say that generally 
about humanity with regard to Newton and lots of other things also).

Cheers,

Alan

At 11:47 AM -0700 6/14/03, David Harris wrote:
>Hi-
>Wow, reading through the thesis makes me think it should be called 
>SCRATCHpad --
>he had to do everything from scratch, including light-pen tracking and basic
>display processing.  I must say I feel (a lot) spoiled!
>David
>
>Alan Kay wrote:
>
>>  I've put pdf files of the Sketchpad thesis and the Early History chapter at:
>>
>>  http://www.squeakalpha.org/~sqftp/Sketchpad.pdf.zip     about 10MB
>>
>>  and
>>
>>  http://www.squeakalpha.org/~sqftp/Smallhistory.pdf.zip   about 3.2MB
>>
>>  Cheers,
>>
>>  Alan
>>
>>  ------
>>
>>  At 9:26 AM -0400 6/14/03, Brent Vukmer wrote:
>>  >  > > 
>>http://theses.mit.edu:80/Dienst/UI/2.0/Describe/0018.mit.theses/1963-10
>>  >>
>>  >>  It is not convenient to read scanned GIFs, but it is better than
>>  >>  nothing!
>>  >
>>  >The GIFs are very, very high-quality.  The only inconvenience is
>>  >having to read the thesis one page at a time via the Web interface (
>>  >no PDF thumbnails, bookmarks, etc ).
>>  >
>>  >Thanks for the link, Ned!  I am LOVING this.
>>
>>  --


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