Alan Kay Technology Quotations

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

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.

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

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

Technology is anything invented after you were born, everything else is just stuff.

Every technology really needs to be shipped with a special manual - not how to use it but why, when and for what.

An important technology first creates a problem and then solves it.

The Internet was done so well that most people think of it as a natural resource like the Pacific Ocean, rather than something that was man-made. When was the last time a technology with a scale like that was so error-free? The Web, in comparison, is a joke. The Web was done by amateurs.