Yosef writes:

> I can't seem to find the first part of this thread. Who joined Hewlett
>  Packard?

The reason that you can't find the start of the thread is that it didn't
start here. A few days ago, I sent the following article from the NY Times to
a few friends, privately, off-list. Somehow, among the several responses, it
somehow jumped the tracks and moved over to HP3000-L midstream. I've included
not only the original article below but also a few selected paragraphs from
an interview with Alan Kay, the fellow who just recently joined HP labs and
was the subject of the NY Times article, that I deeply agree with.

Wirt Atmar

========================================

A Computing Pioneer of the 1970's Joins Hewlett-Packard

By STEVE LOHR

Alan Kay, a personal computing innovator who was a leader of Xerox's
pioneering Palo Alto Research Center in the 1970's, has joined
Hewlett-Packard as a senior researcher.

His arrival at Hewlett-Packard Laboratories, which the company is announcing
today, comes at a time when the company is hoping that research can point to
new markets in personal computing and give the company an edge against Dell
Computer -- the pacesetter in today's personal computer business and a
company known more for operational excellence than product innovation.

[In yesterday's NY Times, in an article on PC's, Duane Zitner, now executive
vice president in charge of the PC business said that, "We want to be a
leader or the leader in personal computers." Zitzner said he believes that
product innovation should give Hewlett-Packard an edge. In the mainstream PC
business the microprocessors are supplied by others (mostly Intel) and the
operating system software for desktops, notebooks and handhelds are supplied
by Microsoft. Even so, Zitzner insisted that there is ample leeway for
improving hardware design, software and the consumer experience. "There's
lots of innovation in this space," he said. Hewlett-Packard has some powerful
industry partners rooting for it. Microsoft, in particular, would like to see
Hewlett-Packard's product-innovation formula suceed.]

Hiring Dr. Kay is an investment in Hewlett-Packard's innovation strategy.
Throughout his career, Dr. Kay has worked on the design concepts and
underlying technology to improve the interaction between people and
computers. In the late 1960's, when computing was done on room-size mainframe
computers, Dr. Kay described a concept computer he called the Dynabook. It
would weigh little more than a book; rest on the user's lap; and come with a
flat-panel screen, a keyboard and a stylus, since it would recognize
handwriting. It would communicate wirelessly.

The computer industry has been pursuing the Dynabook ever since. The recently
introduced Tablet PC models, made by PC companies like Hewlett-Packard and
running Microsoft software, is the latest entry.

At the Xerox research center, better known as PARC, Dr. Kay led the team that
put a graphics-capable display, overlapping windows, icons and a
point-and-click user interface into a working computer called the Alto.
Apple's Macintosh and Microsoft's Windows are descendants of the Alto.

Dr. Kay and a few PARC colleagues, notably Dan Ingalls and Adele Goldberg,
also developed Smalltalk, an influential programming language that uses
blocks of code, known as objects, that are put together, like the cells that
make up the human body, to build applications.

At Hewlett-Packard, Dr. Kay, who is 62, intends to continue pursuing his goal
of improving the experience of computing. "The goal is to show what the next
big relationship between people and computing is likely to be," Dr. Kay said
in an interview.

The best way to do that, Dr. Kay explained, is to build prototypes that will
"show ideas in motion."

"The trick for a person like me," he added, "is that you get people most
excited by something that looks like a product. And I'm betting that some of
it will be interesting to H.P."

With the PC business in the doldrums, many executives and analysts say they
believe that the industry is entering maturity. Dr. Kay disagrees. Personal
computing, he insisted, is "ripe for new markets -- I don't think the real
computing revolution has happened yet."

Dr. Kay declined to discuss his ideas precisely. Starting at Xerox PARC, he
has focused on trying to make computing an engaging medium for play and
learning, and he has often worked with children. After PARC, Dr. Kay held
research positions at Atari, Apple and Disney, where his five-year contract
ended in September 2001. Since then, he has worked mainly at a nonprofit
organization he helped found, the Viewpoints Research Institute, which seeks
to find ways to use computing to improve education for children as well as
their understanding of complex systems like software.

Since he left Disney, Dr. Kay has been approached by other technology
companies besides Hewlett-Packard. But the person who recruited him at
Hewlett-Packard, Patrick Scaglia, who heads Internet and computing platforms
research, had studied under the same professor, Dave Evans, at the University
of Utah, which was a wellspring of early computer graphics research.

"Ultimately, it comes down to the vibes and trust," Dr. Kay said of his
decision to join Hewlett-Packard.

========================================

> As an aside, here's an interesting interview with Dr. Kay, which I
> stumbled upon when refreshing my memory about his "DynaBook" concept
> after the recent introduction of the Tablet PCs:
>
>     http://www.honco.net/os/kay.html

I greatly appreciate you putting up this reference, Glenn. I didn't know much
about Kay until I read this interview, but his comments struck a deeply
resonant chord with me. Indeed, I felt as if I would have written sections of
his interview, especially these two pieces, and most especially the second
half, following the dots:

======================================

Every idea, no matter how revolutionary it may appear, is built on previous
ideas. Still, at some point the accumulation of new ideas might suddenly
require a new context in order to deal with them. I think this applies to the
Dynabook. What interests me, in regard to your question, is adding something
more to literacy. And this is a grand tradition.

What is literature about? Literature is a conversation in writing about
important ideas. That's why Euclid's Elements and Newton's Principia
Mathematica are as much a part of the Western world's tradition of great
books as Plato's Dialogues. But somehow we've come to think of science and
mathematics as being apart from literature. In spite of the fact that our
society is built largely on the technologies that come out of understanding
science and math, we've ceased to regard literacy about these things as
important. And that's a big mistake.

Literacy is not just about being able to read street signs or medicine
labels. It means being able to deal in the world of ideas. In a democratic
society you need people to be in conversational contact with the important
ideas of the past and of the present, which means being able to read about
them and write about them and talk about them. It's obvious that the American
educational system has fallen far short of reaching that goal.

[...]

Marshall McLuhan made the point that one of the crucial things about printed
books was that you didn't have to read them in a social setting, such as a
classroom. People can pursue knowledge independently and from the most
unorthodox, subversive, or just plain weird points of view. But that is
rarely how things are taught in school. Most educators want kids to learn
things in the form of belief rather than being able to construct a kind of
skeptical scaffolding, which is what science is all about. The ability to
explore and test multiple points of view is one of the great strengths of our
culture, but you'd never know it by looking at a classroom.

Science today is taught in America as a secular religion. But science is not
the same as knowing the things learned by science. Science itself is a stance
in relationship to knowledge. In order to do science, you have to give up the
notion of truth. Because we don't know the world directly; we know the world
through our mind's representational systems, which are like maps. Science is
a map that is always incomplete, and so it can always be criticized and
improved. And that's why it's so effective at, say, treating diabetes, or
whatever. Because the map is incomplete, it can always be improved, and so it
is the best way to deal with what is.

One of the problems with the way computers are used in education is that they
are most often just an extension of this idea that learning means just
learning accepted facts. But what really interests me is using computers to
transmit ideas, points of view, ways of thinking. You don't need a computer
for this, but just as with a musical instrument, once you get onto this way
of using them, then the computer is a great amplifier for learning.

=======================================

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