Alan Kaye and Modeling


Fortune has an article on Alan Kaye. Alan decries the current uses of computing and says:

"We're running on fumes technologically today," he says. "The sad truth is that 20 years or so of commercialization have almost completely missed the point of what personal computing is about."
From Fortune.com - Fast Forward - A PC Pioneer Decries the State of Computing
Referenced Tue Jul 13 2004 11:28:46 GMT-0600

His chief complaint with regard to business use of computing is that its more or less simply used as a replacement for pen and paper. What he'd like to see more of is modeling and simulating. He doesn't mention spreadsheets, so I'm not sure if he sees them in the same light or just the way their commonly used. Whenever I contemplate a new business one of the things I do is create a free cash flow model of the business and run lots of scenarios. I don't think I'm alone in that and that's certainly modeling.

I am, however, shocked by how difficult it is to show those models to other people. When I do this, most people want a static snapshot printed out and stuck in a book. That hardly captures the dynamic nature of the model.

Alan's latest project is Squeak. Alan demonstrated Squeak at ETCon 2003. Here's what I said at the time:

The keynote for this morning is Alan Kay and is entitled "Daddy, are we there yet?" Alan is the inventor of SmallTalk, among other things and he has Utah ties, getting his PhD from the Univ. of Utah in 1969. His primary complaint is that the last 20 years have been pretty darn boring because we're spending our time making better buggy whips in the form of better spreadsheets, better ways to write memos, etc. Alan quotes from a paper written in 1963 called "Man-Computer Symbiosis:" In not too many years, human being and computing machined will be coupled together very tightly and the resulting partnership will think as no human brain has ever thought before. he claims that this hasn't happened in large part yet, although I'd argue that networked computing has allowed some of us have made some progress in that direction.

To prove his point, Alan is going through four or five examples (all with live demos and video which is pretty cool) of really neat, revolutionary computer science breakthrough including Ivan Sutherland's Sketchpad and McCarthy's LISP 1.5 implementation for the PDP-1. He is now showing what is likely the first collaborative software system: Engelbart's NLS. Built in 1968, it had live full motion video conferencing and concurrent document editing with shared cursors.

Alan shows something called "end user computer literacy" which is a graphical LOGO-like environment where users draw things like cars and steering wheels and then connect them together using scripts they build from property panels. It doesn't sound dearly as impressive as it was to see. The goal is to get kids building programs and using it to do experiments. One of the examples is using the system to explore the notion of a gravitational acceleration constant.

The base system is called Squeak. Squeak is the programming language and the OS. Its a grand total of 2.8M of binaries. One interesting thing he showed was that his presentation was actually a sequence of desktops so that each slide was a fully functional view. This made for some pretty cool demos.
From Phil Windley | Done at ETCon
Referenced Tue Jul 13 2004 11:38:33 GMT-0600

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Last modified: Thu Oct 10 12:47:21 2019.