American - Scientist | May 17, 1940 -
Computer science inverts the normal. In normal science, you're given a world, and your job is to find out the rules. In computer science, you give the computer the rules, and it creates the world.
Alan Kay
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People who are really serious about software should make their own hardware.
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The best way to predict the future is to invent it.
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If you don't fail at least 90 percent of the time, you're not aiming high enough.
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Some people worry that artificial intelligence will make us feel inferior, but then, anybody in his right mind should have an inferiority complex every time he looks at a flower.
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In the old days, you would chastise people for reinventing the wheel. Now we beg, 'Oh, please, please reinvent the wheel.'
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Steve was perfectly aware of the Dynabook. That was one of the reasons he wanted me to come to Apple.
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Quite a few people have to believe something is normal before it becomes normal - a sort of 'voting' situation. But once the threshold is reached, then everyone demands to do whatever it is.
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Perspective is worth 80 IQ points.
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Most software today is very much like an Egyptian pyramid with millions of bricks piled on top of each other, with no structural integrity, but just done by brute force and thousands of slaves.
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There is the desire of a consumer society to have no learning curves. This tends to result in very dumbed-down products that are easy to get started on, but are generally worthless and/or debilitating.
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The protean nature of the computer is such that it can act like a machine or like a language to be shaped and exploited.
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