alankay1

Please do email -- I don't even bark much, and bite not at all.

The difference between "provocative" and "rude" is probably in the eyes of the beholders. As I alluded, the main job of giving a talk -- whether university or elsewhere -- is to help all wake up, including the speaker!

I was specifically invited to talk about "invention vs innovation" and about making "an industry vs a company" -- that wasn't clear in the syllabus.

However, just to make you feel better (I hope), I did do a startup in grad school (called "Creative X").

I said "either my talk is not interesting, or you (the audience) is not interesting, or both. Please try to disabuse me of the latter".

Please try to be more diligent about what you are complaining about. It's clear that I didn't mean remotely what you imply.

Why wouldn't you take the trouble to check your memory before writing the above?

There's a branch of Y Combinator -- YC Research -- that has set up a number of non-profit R&D organizations

PARC happened because of the added "D" which made it impossible for the agency to find open ended "problem finding" research. I don't know of funding since then -- or today -- that is on a reasonable scale and of the same quality and outlook.

This is a key point to be made -- especially about the kind of research that ARPA/PARC did. We built all of ideas in quantity both in order to use them ourselves, and as the only good way to validate them.

This involves teams, and -- for example -- the award in baseball is a "world series ring" for everyone involved in the effort. The standard awards -- including the Draper, which does award to more than one person, are really more like "most valuable player" awards -- which quite misses the point in large scale edge of the art computing research.

And of most of the participants at ARPA-IPTO and PARC. "Dealers of Lightning" was too much of the "hero's journey" trope, and also very confusing in sequence (even to those of us who were there). Both books missed how and why researchers cooperated and coordinated across projects, but "Dream Machine" is much more clear and generally more accurate.

This is one of those stories that has distorted over time. "Dealer" was a weekly meeting for many purposes, the main one was to provide a vehicle for coordination, planning, communication without having to set up a management structure for brilliant researchers who had some "lone wolves" tendencies.

Part of these meetings were presentations by PARC researchers. However, it was not a gantlet to be run, and it was not to train people to argue in a constructive way (most of the computer researchers at PARC were from ARPA community research centers, and learning how to argue reasonably was already part of that culture).

Visitors from Xerox frequently were horrified by the level of argument and the idea that no personal attacks were allowed had to be explained, along with the idea that the aim was not to win an argument but to illuminate. Almost never did the participants have to be reminded about "Class 1" and "Class 2", etc. The audience was -not- determined to prove the speaker wrong. That is not the way things were done.

Nope

It isn't similar, either to PARC or to ARPA-IPTO (before the "D"). It was that "D" that caused PARC to happen, because of the qualitative change in what "Advances Research Projects" were supposed to mean.

Not the same crew or dynamic ...

Let me encourage you to be both. Butler is one of the most amazing people I've met and had the great pleasure of working in the same environment with him for many years. I also think that all of us who were there would not want to try to separate "the great people" from "the great environment" nor would it be possible without great distortion (this is the point that most people miss about ARPA/PARC).

This is one of the most important points

Almost correct. The first laser printers were not the Dover but SLOT by Gary Starkweather at PARC, which was made on top of a 3600 (much faster engine) in the very early 70s, and its connection to the Ethernet EARS a little later (by Ron Rider using an Alto as the server computer).

PARC really wasn't an R&D center for Xerox copiers (this stayed in Rochester), and Gary was a great engineer who could do the work of making a laser and its optics and scanner work with a standard copying engine pretty much by himself.

It's worth noting that the meanings of a number of very important words have changed over the last 500 years -- sometimes enlarged, sometimes really changing, including: true/false, fact, theory, explanation, believe, logic, etc.

And "thinking". Consider the difference between using logic in traditional mathematics to how thinking needs to be done in the sciences. In the former, we are deriving something, in the latter we are -negotiating- between phenomena and our representations. In science, we don't get to nail our premises/definitions, and we don't get to enumerate the extent cases. We only get inductions. And so on. A "perfectly reasoned conclusion" still needs to be checked out with nature.

In life in the large we have to be even more careful about logic, because it plays into several dozens of biases we have -- ultimately from genetics, but many have been honed by our cultures. In order to do modern thinking in almost every arena, we have to add a lot of context to normal logic, and often have to paradoxically weaken it in order to think better.

In talks, I try to get audiences to understand that logic is not nearly as good a way to think about thinking and do thinking as (say) science is. And science is not the only powerful context we can use to help us calibrate our mental compasses.

With regard to "thinking", logic is one of the servants of the Art, not the Master.

Exactly ...

In the early 90s, on two separate occasions, I was offered "3 Altos" for just a few dollars (one batch was from Stanford that had been using them for printer servers, and I don't remember where the second batch came from).

Over the years I wound up donating them to various places (the Computer History Museum, the Kyoto Prize museum, the Boston Science Museum, etc.). We kept one at Viewpoints as a mascot, and my last one I gave to Sam Altman because he wanted to do a restoration. That one turned out to be a late hybrid that Ken Shirriff and company are having fun puzzling out.

The "random mouse on ebay" was at my suggestion, because the Alto I donated to Sam didn't have a mouse.

Most of the original runs of Alto IIs (at least 1500 of them were built) cost in 70s dollars about $22.5K apiece. Inflation (according to the web) since then has been about a factor of 5, so each Alto would have been about $112.5K (and I'd love to have a $112.5K personal computer today -- that would really be "computing in the future" as we did at Parc).

The subsequent sentences are also there for disclaimers and subsetting. The first sentence model is too weak for real writing.

I don't take notes. (It's worth pondering whether taking notes is really an aid to internal remembering...) In any case, what I was trying to point out was that it could be the case that we actually remember almost everything, but have real difficulties in recalling our memories without cues. (It's also worth pondering just what it is that "autistic savants" might actually be doing ...)

Good point! (Cog Psych shows that we don't really multi-task.) I've always been partial to beds and couches for reading ... and especially in the very early mornings ...

I think these are good advice. A few additions and complements:

What seemed to work for me: 1. I started reading very early in life, and like early sports and music learning, I think this made a difference.

2. Most recall and understanding is relative to existing knowledge, so the more you have to link up to (and the more you read with linking up in mind) the better.

3. I've found that association (2.) works better than trying to understand everything while reading (the understanding is generally there the next day).

A start here would be to see if your reading of the AMA resulted in an accurate memory. For example, did I actually claim to have read "20,000+ books"? What did I actually say? No amount of speed is going to help if the recall is so noisy? And, something to ponder, it would have been easy to look to see if what you attributed to me was accurate? Why didn't you? And so forth.

These are often important, useful, and needed.

I would take a different perspective that puts as "higher forces" things like:

-- what helps thinking about things in general, about problems, and resolving them (epistemological concerns, which include the whole environment as intrinsic to "langauge")

-- representational matchups to what we are trying to model and create dynamic inference processes for (mathematical concerns -- this is why "mathematics" is a plural, in real math you invent maths when needed ...)

-- orthogonal axes for many areas, including meaning and optimizations, including definitions and meta definitions, debugging, reformulation, etc. (pragmatic concerns for eventually winding up with workable artifacts)

-- and so forth ...

It's worth pondering the real implications of real objects as real virtual machines intercommunicating by messages (they were inspired in part by the pervasive world-wide networking that was part of Licklider's vision).

One way to think about this is that "hardware objects" are merely caches for the software objects that will embody the processes and intents.

As a cache, each computer needs a small amount of code to deal with resources of time and space and i/o to and from the net. This could be called a "micro-kernel", but in an object world, it is also objects, not a "stack". For "doing things", we can imagine a system of "real objects" residing on one or more of the hardware caches. What mix depends on the individual resources of the caches.

The wonderful Gerry Popek did a first pass at this kind of caching architecture that worked over a mixture of machine types in the 1980s -- it was called LOCUS -- and there is an excellent book from MIT Press that explains the issues and how it works.

Its main limitations were that it was made as an extension of Unix processes, but it definitely proved the concept of how this part of really distributed "objects" with cached resources worked. (I tried to get Apple to buy this system when I first got there in 1984.)

Bottom line is that there is nothing that resembles any of the huge monolithic OSs of today that "try" to make software dependent on them rather than to allow software to run everywhere and move everywhere.

So "OSs are not necessary".

(Smalltalk at Parc did not run on top of an OSs ... etc.)

The question is whether a "message" has enough "stuff" to reify into a real process (so it can help interpretation and negotiation) or whether the receiver has to do all the work (and thus perhaps has to know too much for graceful scaling of the system).

One of many problems with trying to use Unix as "modules" and "objects" is that they have things that aren't objects (like strings, etc) and this makes it difficult for arranging various scales and extensions of use.

It's not so much "scale-free" but this idea I mentioned elsewhere of "find the most difficult thing you have to do really nicely" and then see how it scales down (scaling up nicely rarely even barely possible). This was what worked with Smalltalk -- I came up with about 20 examples that had to be "nice", and some of them were "large" (for their day). We -- especially Dan Ingalls and Ted Kaehler -- were able to find ways to make the bigger more general things small and efficient enough to work uniformly over all the scales we had to deal with.

In other parts of this AMA I've mentioned some of the problems when extended to the whole world (but go for "galactic" to help thinking!)

Almost nothing in today's languages or OSs are in the current state of "biology".

However, several starts could be to relax from programming by message sending (a tough prospect in the large) to programming by message receiving, and in particular to program by intent/meaning negotiation.

And so forth.

Linda was a great idea of the 80s, what is the similar idea scaled for 40 years later? (It won't look like Linda, so don't start your thinking from there ...)

Etc.

Better to invent the electric light bulb than to cope with candles ... ?

Just to bring up one possibly helpful analogy:

Suppose we have a good model of atoms -- how much of this will be a good way to think about living systems? (Or should we come up with better and more useful architectural ideas that are a better fit to the scales we are trying to deal with -- hint: in biology, they are not like atomic physics or even much of chemistry ...)

A point here is that trying to make atomic physics better will only help a little if at all. So trying to make early languages "much better" likely misses most if not all of the real progress that is needed on an Internet or larger scale.

(I personally think that much enterprise software even today needs architectural ideas and languages that are different in kind than the languages of the 60s and 70s (meaning most of the languages used today).

The basic principle of both points above is that "problem finding" is the hardest thing in "real research", so a lot of things need to be done to help this ... (this is a very tough sell and even "explain" today -- almost everyone is brought up -- especially in schools -- to solve problems, rather than to actually find good ones) -- and virtually all funders today want to know what problems their fundees are going to solve - so they underfund (to the point of 0!) the finding processes ...

The ARPA/Parc process "funded people, not projects" -- and today this seems quite outre to most.

As you probably know, Jonathan is doing some work with us ...