{"id":19042,"date":"2017-09-28T16:30:18","date_gmt":"2017-09-28T20:30:18","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/mjtsai.com\/blog\/?p=19042"},"modified":"2018-01-03T10:10:55","modified_gmt":"2018-01-03T15:10:55","slug":"alan-kay-on-the-iphone","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/mjtsai.com\/blog\/2017\/09\/28\/alan-kay-on-the-iphone\/","title":{"rendered":"Alan Kay on the iPhone"},"content":{"rendered":"

Alan Kay<\/a>:<\/p>\n

\n

If people could understand what computing was about, the iPhone would not be a bad thing. But because people don’t understand what computing is about, they think they have it in the iPhone, and that illusion is as bad as the illusion that Guitar Hero is the same as a real guitar. That’s the simple long and the short of it.<\/p>\n

What’s interesting is, the computational ability of an iPhone is far beyond what we need to do good computing. What you wind up with is something that has enough stuff on it and is connected to enough stuff, so it seems like the entire thing.<\/p>\n

[…]<\/p>\n

So, I talked to Steve on the phone [about adding a standard pen and penholder]. I said, “Look Steve. You know, you’ve made something that is perfect for 2-year-olds and perfect for 92-year-olds. But everybody in-between learns to use tools.”<\/p>\n

[…]<\/p>\n

Well, a saying I made up at PARC was, “Simple things should be simple, complex things should be possible.” They’ve got simple things being simple and they have complex things being impossible, so that’s wrong.<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n\n

Update (2017-09-28): Alan Kay<\/a> (via Gok<\/a>):<\/p>\n

Let me try to help this community regarding this article by providing some context. First, you need to realize that in the more than 50 years of my career I have always waited to be asked: Every paper, talk, and interview has been invited, never solicited. But there is a body of results from these that do put forward my opinions.<\/p>\n

This article was a surprise, because the interview was a few years ago for a book the interviewer was writing. It’s worth noting that nowhere in the actual interview did I advocate going back and doing a Dynabook. My comments are mostly about media and why it’s important to understand and design well any medium that will be spread and used en-mass.<\/p>\n

If you looked closely, then you would have noticed the big difference between the interview and the front matter. For example, I’m not still waiting for my dream to come true. You need to be sophisticated enough to see that this is a headline written to attract. It has nothing to do with what I said.<\/p>\n

And, if you looked closely, you might note a non seq right in the beginning, from “you want to see old media?” to no followup. This is because that section was taken from the chapter of the book but then edited by others.<\/p>\n

The first version of the article said I was fired from Apple, but it was Steve who was fired, and some editor misunderstood.<\/p><\/blockquote>","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Alan Kay: If people could understand what computing was about, the iPhone would not be a bad thing. But because people don’t understand what computing is about, they think they have it in the iPhone, and that illusion is as bad as the illusion that Guitar Hero is the same as a real guitar. That’s […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"apple_news_api_created_at":"","apple_news_api_id":"","apple_news_api_modified_at":"","apple_news_api_revision":"","apple_news_api_share_url":"","apple_news_coverimage":0,"apple_news_coverimage_caption":"","apple_news_is_hidden":false,"apple_news_is_paid":false,"apple_news_is_preview":false,"apple_news_is_sponsored":false,"apple_news_maturity_rating":"","apple_news_metadata":"\"\"","apple_news_pullquote":"","apple_news_pullquote_position":"","apple_news_slug":"","apple_news_sections":"\"\"","apple_news_suppress_video_url":false,"apple_news_use_image_component":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[2],"tags":[1611,1271,295,31,145,85,30,173,96],"class_list":["post-19042","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-technology","tag-alan-kay","tag-apple-pencil","tag-history","tag-ios","tag-ipad","tag-iphone","tag-mac","tag-stevejobs","tag-web"],"apple_news_notices":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/mjtsai.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/19042","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/mjtsai.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/mjtsai.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mjtsai.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mjtsai.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=19042"}],"version-history":[{"count":3,"href":"https:\/\/mjtsai.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/19042\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":19049,"href":"https:\/\/mjtsai.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/19042\/revisions\/19049"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/mjtsai.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=19042"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mjtsai.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=19042"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mjtsai.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=19042"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}