A new book.

Points of View is a collection of previously-unpublished essays written to celebrate Alan Kay's 70th birthday. Twenty-nine luminaries from diverse disciplines contributed original material for this book.

Contributors include Ivan Sutherland, Leonard Kleinrock, John Sculley, Nicholas Negroponte, David Reed, Butler Lampson, Doug Lenat, Vint Cert, Mitchel Resnick, Bran Ferren, Bob Lucky, Gordon Bell, and Danny Hillis, and more.

Who is Alan Kay?

Alan Kay is one of the most influential computer scientists of the modern era. His contributions, among many others, include the concept of the personal computer.

From the archive, Alan Kay:

We can't learn to see until we realize we are blind.

I once asked Ivan [Sutherland], 'How is it possible for you to have invented computer graphics, done the first object oriented software system and the first real time constraint solver all by yourself in one year?" And he said "I didn't know it was hard."

At PARC we had a slogan: "Point of view is worth 80 IQ points."

If the children are being instructed in the pink plane, can we teach them to think in the blue plane and live in a pink-plane society?