Quotes by Alan Kay

About Alan Kay:

Alan Curtis Kay is an American computer scientist. He has been elected a Fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, the National Academy of Engineering, and the Royal Society of Arts. He is best known for his pioneering work on object-oriented programming and windowing graphical user interface design.
A B C D E F G H I J K L M N O P Q R S T U V W X Y Z

I had the fortune or misfortune to learn how to read fluently starting at the age of three. So I had read maybe 150 books by the time I hit 1st grade. And I already knew that the teachers were lying to me.

Alan Kay

The best way to predict the future is to invent it.

Alan Kay

Science requires a society because even people who are trying to be good thinkers love their own thoughts and theories - much of the debugging has to be done by others.

Alan Kay

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.

Alan Kay

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.

Alan Kay

If you don't fail at least 90 percent of the time, you're not aiming high enough.

Alan Kay

Social thinking requires very exacting thresholds to be powerful. For example, we've had social thinking for 200,000 years, and hardly anything happened that could be considered progress over most of that time. This is because what is most pervasive ...

Alan Kay

As far as Apple goes, it was a different company every few years from the time I joined in 1984.

Alan Kay

The protean nature of the computer is such that it can act like a machine or like a language to be shaped and exploited.

Alan Kay

People who are really serious about software should make their own hardware.

Alan Kay

Technology is anything that wasn't around when you were born.

Alan Kay

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.

Alan Kay

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.

Alan Kay

Context is worth 80 IQ points.

Alan Kay

Having an intelligent secretary does not get rid of the need to read, write, and draw, etc. In a well functioning world, tools and agents are complementary.

Alan Kay

I've been a Fellow in a number of companies: Xerox, Apple, Disney, HP. There are certain similarities because all the Fellows programs were derived from IBM's, which itself was derived from the MIT 'Institute Professor' program.

Alan Kay

All the companies I've worked for have this deep problem of devolving to something like the hunting and gathering cultures of 100,000 years ago. If businesses could find a way to invent 'agriculture,' we could put the world back together and all woul...

Alan Kay

I don't know how many of you have ever met Dijkstra, but you probably know that arrogance in computer science is measured in nano-Dijkstras.

Alan Kay

Scratch the surface in a typical boardroom and we're all just cavemen with briefcases, hungry for a wise person to tell us stories.

Alan Kay

Technology is anything invented after you were born.

Alan Kay

Author Bio

  • NameAlan Kay
  • DescriptionComputer scientist
  • BornMay 17, 1940
  • CountryUnited States Of America
  • ProfessionComputer Scientist; Programmer
  • AwardsTuring Award; Charles Stark Draper Prize