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Comment by IOT_Apprentice | Hacker News Reader

Alan Kay responded above so...

Link at [0].

I'm a little skeptical. That user certainly writes in a similar style to how I've seen Alan Kay write online, but I wouldn't be opposed to seeing some more proof. A one-day-old HN account claiming to belong to one of the most important people in CS from the past 50 years seems a little suspicious haha.

[0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19717640

An interesting and unfortunately true commentary on the lack of civilized behavior using technology that actually required a fair amount of effort -- and civilized behavior -- to invent in the first place.

Yeah, it's definitely disappointing that we have to worry about things like that, but that's the nature of the beast I guess. I hope you don't take any offense at my skepticism! For what it's worth, I'm happy assuming you're the real deal because being a cynic all the time is no fun and I have no specific reason to believe otherwise at the moment; I just also wouldn't be surprised to discover it's fake haha.

Also, I walk by your face a few times a week whenever I head into my lab. MEB has redecorated a few times over the years, but they always have a section of pictures of notable alumni and (of course) you're up there. Thanks for giving us a good name in the field and for all you've done!

Merrill Engineering Building! I'm glad it is still around. Those long hallways were used as a "display" to unroll the many pages of Simula machine code listings down one corridor so that three grad students -- including me -- could crawl over it and coordinate to try to understand just what Simula might actually be (the documentation in Norwegian that had been transliterated into English was not understandable).

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