"Humans have a hard time dealing with new ideas. A lot of the realities that we live in are compelling enough and complete enough, it's hard for people to imagine alternatives."

Full Lecture (1:50:33) Excerpt 1 (2:45) Changing representational structures - a form or artistic cheating. Excerpt 2 (3:48) The Dynabook - finding ways of helping kids think better than adults. Excerpt 3 (5:19) SmallTalk - an object-oriented simulation language for designing your own tools. Excerpt 4 (10:16) Multiple mentalities - people have separate cognitive centers for kinesthetic, cognitive and visual thinking.

From an introduction by Randall Packer: Up until the time Alan Kay began working on the SmallTalk programming language at Xerox Park in the early 1970s, computing had belonged exclusively to the world of engineers. Computers were generally considered too complicated, too specialized, too obscure for artists and educators. But just at the time when personal computing was beginning to dawn on the horizon in the 1970s, - in fact one of the first, the Alto, was built at Xerox Park - Alan Kay had a vision that would ultimately lay the foundation for the development of desktop multimedia, the Graphical User Interface. More than a new technology, more than a scientific breakthrough, the GUI was an open invitation for intellectual workers without scientific credentials to build their digital fantasies on computer screens. Maybe it was because of Alan Kay's musical background and most certainly as a result of his work with children, the graphical interface with its pull-down menus, clickable buttons, and formatted on-screen text opened the door for the computer to become a creative instrument that would unlock intuitive faculties and artistic dreams for many years throughout the 70s. The Alto, with its futuristic interface remained hidden from a world that for the most part still viewed computers with suspicion and fear. But in 1979 the word got out and leaked to one of the only individuals, Steve Jobs, who had the vision and tenacity to take Kay's revolutionary ideas out to the mainstream where they could truly change the World. Five years later, in 1984, the Macintosh was born and little known in the annals of multimedia historical lore, we owe it to Kay to have planted the seed for this machine's operating system, with its creative, fun, intuitive, quirky, and imaginative capabilities. And in so doing, if multimedia today could be said to have a founder it is most probably this man who took the computer out of the laboratory and into the hands of artists.

Fall 96 | Douglas Engelbart | Ted Nelson