The hallmark mop of shaggy black hair is shot with gray, but as he nears a quite implausible sixty years of age, little else has changed. Certainly not the energy level, or the sneakers, so characteristic of his working uniform, or the unceasing effulgence from his mind of historical observation, moral instruction, and technological vision.
“Conversations with Alan Kay aren’t about any particular thing,” says Carver Mead, a Caltech professor who developed the technology of complex integrated circuits at PARC. “They’re more a ramble through Ideaspace.”
Ideaspace Central today is divided between two Southern California locations about ten miles apart. One is Kay’s home in an affluent part of Los Angeles. It is unassuming from the outside except for a towering V-roofed addition. This curious annex was custom-built to shelter a two-story pipe organ professionally hand-crafted of exquisite blond spruce, on which Kay can be heard almost any morning practicing his favorite music by Buxtehude and J. S. Bach. (“Alan believed his role was to make it possible to build the organ, after which he would be the happy caretaker,” remarked its architect, Greg Harrold.)
The second location is a warehouse-like building in Glendale, a smoggy precinct of the San Gabriel Valley just north of L.A. Artfully arranged partitions and bookcases provide Kay with a spacious work area open to the floor through a doorless passage on one side—not too private, for he likes to spend the workday in constant stir, eliciting and dispensing ideas among his co-workers with equal generosity. He greets you wearing an oval name tag reading “Alan” and bearing a picture of Mickey Mouse. It should look ludicrous and it does, until you remember that this is the man whose playful digitized image of Cookie Monster launched the age of the personal computer. Or that he is now employed—as are two other members of the extraordinary team he assembled at PARC—by the Walt Disney Company, which has entrusted him with helping to develop new ways to transmit story and idea from creator to audience.
Alan Kay might have been the role model for the modern computer nerd, a Chuck Yeager for the generation that got engaged by the new technology in the 1970s. If you lived within that era’s insular community of students and electronics nuts you knew his name, perhaps because you had read his lucid explications of microelectronics and software in Scientific American, or read an article featuring him in (of all places) Rolling Stone. You had been socially conditioned to feel ungainly and isolated by your devotion to machines and math; Alan Kay positively reveled in it, swaggered with it, declared in the pages of the counterculture bible itself that you and your awkward pals in all your nebbishy glory were the prophets of a new world in which computers and their unparalleled power would belong to the masses.
The Computer Bum, as he enlightened Rolling Stone’s readers, was someone who looked “about as straight as you’d expect hot-rodders to look. It’s that kind of fanaticism. He’s a person who loves to stay up all night, he and the machine in a love-hate relationship.” The hacker as rebel: Not an undernourished weirdo, merely someone “not very interested in conventional goals.”
“Alan had been thrown out of every university in the country,” recalled John Warnock, a mathematician who knew him first as a fellow graduate student at the University of Utah and later as a colleague at PARC. “He’s not your normal person. He’s a child prodigy who doesn’t quite fit in with your normal academics.”
His wife, Bonnie MacBird, would transfer his personality to a character (distribute it among several, actually) in her original screenplay for the first computer-animated high-tech thriller, a Disney film entitled Tron in which his boldness, his confidence, his exhilarating kines-thesia somehow survived the merciless dilution of Hollywood script doctoring. Alan Kay today is still the kind of person who communicates an impression of pure motion even when he is sitting down. As Carver Mead suggests, a conversation with him is an exhausting scaled-up affair. Once you get him talking he performs what he calls a “brain dump” on you, years of accumulated knowledge and synthesis pouring forth in a flood of narrative in which the protagonists are Alan Kay and the startling and visionary ideas he holds dear (many of them still deplorably unrealized), and their adversaries are managers, executives, bean-counters, corporate boards, schoolteachers, and all others who regard the unshackled imagination as a menace rather than a gift.
Visible within the flood of ideas is the Alan Kay who made computing cool. He declared publicly that it was all right to use three-million-dollar machines to play games and “screw around.” If that meant grad students were blasting digital rocket ships off their computer screens in a game called “Spacewar,” it was all part of the weaving of new technology into the cultural fabric. His unashamed view of the computer as very much a toy liberated many others to explore its genius for procedures other than the parsing of numbers and the sequencing of databases—to see it, in other words, as a creative tool.
This notion of technology as a means to an end still distinguishes Kay from most other practitioners of the art and science of technology. One factor in his powerful kinship with Bob Taylor was their shared curiosity about what this machine could be made to do, more than how. Notwithstanding his incessant harangues, most of the inspired engineers Taylor recruited to CSL, the Lampsons and Thackers, started out too blindly focused on the issue of what was within their power to actually build. They would ask: What is the next stop on the road? Kay turned the question inside out: Let’s figure out where we want to go, and that will show us how to get there. He never lost sight of the computer’s appropriate station in the world: to conform to the user’s desires, not the other way around.
“It’s almost impossible for most people to see technology as the tool rather than the end,” he was saying one day in his cubicle at Disney Imagineering’s Glendale warehouse. He was about to embark on another excursion through what Carver Mead called Ideaspace, where hyperbole and metaphor are equivalent coins of the realm (or obverse sides of the same coin). “People get trapped in thinking that anything in the environment is to be taken as a given. It’s part of the way our nervous system works. But it’s dangerous to take it as a given because then it controls you, rather than the other way around. That’s McLuhan’s insight, one of the bigger ones in the twentieth century. Zen in the twentieth century is about taking things that have been rendered invisible by this process and trying to make them visible again.
“Parents ask me what they should do to help their kids with science. I say, on a walk always take a magnifying glass along. Be a miniature exploratorium….”
You would have to know something about his life to recognize this as a scene from his childhood. Kay’s father was a scientist, a physiologist engaged in designing prostheses for arms and legs. “I can certainly remember going on walks with him,” Kay recalled. “And when you go on a walk with a parent who’s interested in science, it’s usually about all the things that you can’t readily see.”
This sort of unleashed curiosity would allow him to recognize new ways of placing computing power in everyone’s hands. But he had to travel a fair distance before discovering that his destiny lay in the arcane science of systems programming. That might never have happened at all had circumstances not left him becalmed on an Air Force base in Waco, Texas, in the suspended state of existence known as “Figmo.”
The term is a military acronym for “Fuck it, got my orders.” As always with service slang, one can hardly think of a better way to describe the condition. It was 1961 and Kay was marking off the last two years of his enlistment. At this moment he was working in the pathology lab at James Conway AFB, on the verge of being transferred on.
“I was in figmo, when you’re at your old base but everybody knows you’re about to go somewhere else. You’re not for real anymore on this old base. You sit around and play cards and read books, one of the best things in the military. I was trying to get a little better at poker with a figmo who was a professional poker player, the trick being to see if I could make it a learning experience instead of just getting fleeced.”
But if Kay could not be ordered to do a damn thing pending his transfer, his state of enforced idleness left him wide open to being enticed. In this case the enticement was the scheduling of an aptitude test for computer programmers. No one from Conway had ever passed this test. To a prodigy, however, any standardized test is like a carnival midway. Kay, whose mind was as nimble as it was underemployed, viewed it as a lark. “No way I’d ever pass up a test,” he said. Naturally, he passed handily.
As luck would have it, the Air Force did not view programmer training quite so casually. Undergoing a full-scale conversion from primitive punch card tabulators to the IBM 1401, the world’s first popular general business computer, the service was pulling linguists out of Europe to turn them into programmers and scouring the ranks for anyone showing the slightest ability.
“They figured that since you’d taken this test, IBM could teach you to program the 1401 from scratch in one week,” Kay recalled. “It wasn’t computer science, just training, but it was the best training I’ve ever had. You worked your ass off and at the end of the week you could program a computer.”
On the surface Kay seemed an unlikely candidate to take to the rigors of instructing a machine how to operate, for by habit he responded poorly to rules and regulations not his own. The explanation, however, lies in how a computer’s stern and unyielding logical rules can lead to infinitely creative results.
Computers look smart, but their intelligence is a fraud, a sleight-of-hand stunt abetted by blinding speed and a capacity for infinite reiteration. They must be instructed how to perform every tiny step of a problem of ratiocination, and in what sequence. That is why nothing that ever happens inside a computer is entirely unexpected (unless it is going wrong). The machine has been shown the way by its programmer, like a child taken for a stroll along a garden path. Both partners know the rules of the journey. Let the programmer stray one step off the path—let’s say by coding a command that violates the machine’s logic—and the computer will refuse to follow. Let the computer break the rules—refusing to take the next step along the mandated path—and the programmer will know it is sick and must be cured before they can take even one more stride together.
Obviously, then, programmers must conform to a system. They instruct the machine to follow a series of conditions (if such-and-such a condition is met, do this; otherwise do that…. If you have done that, and such-and-such a state also exists, do this; else that). But the conditions must themselves conform to logic that has been burned into the machine’s circuits by the designer, or it will not comprehend. Computer programming is the process of telling a computer in its own language how to read and follow this cascade of “ifs.” The programmer establishes a set of rules that happen to conform in a very fundamental way to the machine’s own. It is the ultimate recursive endeavor, the joint discovery of rules and regulations leading to the invention of more rules and regulations that allow the machine to extend and expand its abilities and, consequently, those of its programmer and user. Alan Kay would become an expert in this partnership (and in a related field, the programming of programmers; but that lay far in the future).
But there is a marvelous catch: These logical rules and regulations can apply to any abstract conditions the programmer chooses to define. As Kay put it years later: “Computers’ use of symbols, like the use of symbols in language and mathematics, is sufficiently disconnected from the real world to enable them to create splendid nonsense…Although the hardware of the computer is subject to natural laws (electrons can move through the circuits only in certain physically defined ways), the range of simulations the computer can perform is bounded only by the limits of human imagination. In a computer, spacecraft can be made to travel faster than the speed of light, time to travel in reverse.”
His enchantment with a system so rigidly structured yet infinitely malleable may have had to do with his childhood in the bosom of a close but itinerant family. One year after his birth in 1940 in Springfield, Massachusetts, the family had moved to Australia, his father’s native land. Only four years later they were on the move again, fleeing a Japanese fleet that had already reached New Guinea and seemed prepared to continue its way south without resistance. Back in the United States the Kays took up residence in the Hadley, Massachusetts, farmhouse of Alan’s maternal grandfather. He was Clifton Johnson, a writer, musician, and pioneering documentary photographer early in the century. In this farmhouse Kay’s education began.
Clifton Johnson had died the year of Alan’s birth, inspiring a family fancy that the old man’s inquisitive and creative temperament had been infused into the grandson’s. More prosaically, Johnson had filled the house with books, five thousand of them, addressing every topic under the sun. Alan reached first grade as a five-year-old autodidact. “By the time I got to school, I had already read a couple hundred books. I knew in the first grade that they were lying to me because I had already been exposed to other points of view. They didn’t like the idea of having different points of view, so it was a battle.”
There were some respites from the combat. One was music, taught to him by his mother, who had received her own musical training from Johnson himself. But otherwise the contest continued through his entire school career. This ranged, thanks to his father’s career as a university scientist and a physiologist, from the elite Brooklyn Technical High School to public school in Port Washington on suburban Long Island. There were sickly periods leading to further self-education, including a bad bout of rheumatic fever in his senior year of high school, and further contentiousness (a dismissal for insubordination in Brooklyn).
Port Washington in Kay’s recollection was a community suffused with music. “This was a place where football players played in the band and orchestra for status. It was the thing. The Congregational Church had five choirs, each with 100 voices. I’ll never forget Easter, when they’d combine the choirs for sunrise services. Full orchestra. Five hundred voices. The best, best stuff.” There he also met Chris Jeffers, who would introduce him to his first computer. Jeffers was a junior, a year behind Kay (although since Kay’s illness lost him a year of school, they graduated together). He was also a superb pianist with perfect pitch and a thriving jazz band. Kay joined up on guitar. The band played Dixieland jazz from Jeffers’s effortless arrangements, an interesting choice if one is looking for a form that imposes strict formal rules on players who are encouraged to break them according to another set of strict formal rules.
They split for college, Jeffers to the University of Colorado and Kay to Bethany College, a small West Virginia school with a decent program in biology. Academic disaster reunited them. As Kay tells the story, Bethany took umbrage at his charge that the administration imposed a Jewish quota to control the number of New Yorkers in its pre-medical program. The dean instructed him not to return to campus after Easter recess. Kay called Jeffers, unaware that his friend had himself been suspended for spending all his time on a student musical production instead of classwork.
“Guess what, Chris,” Kay said. “I just got thrown out of school!”
“Great, me too! When you coming out?”
Jeffers had decided to stay in Denver, taking a job at the national reservations office of United Airlines, a vast computer depot located near Stapleton International Airport, until he could resume his education. The two friends took up residence in the basement of a condemned building not far from the end of the runway. Kay found work in a music store, where he could wait for lightning to jolt him into the next stage of his life.
One day Jeffers invited him to visit United. Kay understood computers in the abstract, the way curious kids understood them in the days when the most modest machine represented a ten-million-dollar capital investment. United’s IBM 305 RAMAC was the first one he ever touched. It was huge, specifically designed to manage colossal databases like the fifty-two weeks’ worth of reservations and seating records consigned to Denver’s safekeeping. But what really struck Kay was the primitiveness of its operational routine. The system was serviced by platoons of attendants, full-time menials doing nothing more refined than taking stacks of punch cards from one machine and loading them in the next. To his amazement, digital electronics turned out to be as mindless and labor-intensive as laying a sewer line. As Kay’s eyes followed the drones traversing the workhouse floor, the germ of an idea took hold. There was an exorbitant discrepancy between the purpose of the machine—which was to simplify human endeavor—and the effort required to realize it. Kay banked the insight. He would not begin to understand it until much later, well after the lark of taking an Air Force aptitude test metamorphosed into a serious career choice.
The two-week IBM course he received courtesy of Conway AFB was effective, but rudimentary. “Programming is in two parts,” he said later. “The bricklaying part, which IBM taught, and the architecture part, which can take two or three years.”
In those days every computer was different. There was nothing like today’s standardized architectures, according to which all IBM-compatible machines, for instance, respond to the same set of operating instructions even though they may be manufactured by different companies according to widely variant specifications of memory, data storage, and even microprocessor design. Standardization has helped make computers a mass-market phenomenon. It allows users to be reasonably confident that a program bought off the shelf will work properly regardless of who manufactured their computer, just as they know they will find the accelerator and brake pedal in the same location regardless of whether their car is a Ford or a Chevrolet.
Nothing of the kind existed in the computer world in the 1960s. Machines differed in shape, size, and architecture down to the circuitry inside their cabinets and the sequences of digital ones and zeros delivering instructions to the central processing unit. The same eight-bit sequence, say “11110000,” might tell a Burroughs computer to add two numbers together and a Control Data 6600 to divide one by the other. Each machine had its unique method for everything from storing files on disk or drum to performing basic mathematical functions. The differences were entirely arbitrary, no more consistent than if the pedal by the right foot operated the accelerator on a Ford but the headlights on a Chevy.
Nor did the manufacturers see any advantage to marketing machines even remotely like their competitors’. Once IBM sold a system to United Airlines it could rest assured that the frightful effort of rewriting software, retraining staff, and moving tons of iron and steel cabinets around would make United think very long and hard before replacing its IBM system by one made by, say, Honeywell.
Therefore Kay, who had programmed everything from a Burroughs 5000 at the Air Force Air Training Command to a Control Data 6600 at NCAR, the National Center for Atmospheric Research, was compelled to become a student of computer architectures. Subconsciously his mind was absorbing the principles of programming that would grow a few years hence at PARC into an extraordinary advance in software design. As he recalled later, however, at the moment “I barely saw it.”
So too did he assimilate only subconsciously an article in a technical magazine he came upon while debugging NCAR’s giant CDC 6600 in Chippewa Falls, Wisconsin, in 1965. The magazine was Electronics. For its thirty-fifth anniversary issue it had invited a few industry leaders to plot a technology curve for the next ten years. The research director at Fairchild Semiconductor Co., a brilliant engineer named Gordon Moore, contributed a four-page piece insouciantly entitled “Cramming More Components onto Integrated Circuits.” The essay forecast that as circuits became more densely packed with microscopic transistors, computing power would exponentially increase in performance and diminish in cost over the years. Moore contended that this trend could be predicted mathematically, so that memory costing $500,000 in 1965 would come all the way down to $3,000 by 1985—an insight so basic to the subsequent growth and expansion of the computer industry that ever since then it has been known as “Moore’s Law.”
That day in 1965, however, Alan Kay skimmed Moore’s article and laid it aside, unmoved. The dream of a computer scaled down to serve a single human being would not come to him for another couple of years. As he toiled in Chippewa Falls on a room-sized, freon-cooled CDC 6600, Gordon Moore’s astonishing prediction that electronics had embarked on a journey of unceasing miniaturization seemed to have no relevance to his life at all.
“I was in an embryonic state. I didn’t want to work and get a real job, but go to graduate school. The only criterion was that it had to be above four thousand feet in altitude.”
In 1966 Kay finally secured his bachelor’s degree from the University of Colorado, a double major in mathematics and molecular biology. The only doctoral program he could find to fit his exacting specification was the one Dave Evans had established at Utah with a $5 million grant from Bob Taylor at ARPA. To his own amazement he got accepted as the seventh graduate student in the school’s tiny department of computer science.
“I discovered later that Evans never looked at my grades,” Kay said. “He didn’t believe in it. You had to send him a resume, which was all he ever looked at. He was like Al Davis of the Oakland Raiders; his theory was to let everybody into training camp and give them a really decent chance, then be incredibly savage cutting the roster. I was completely thrilled that this guy seemed to think so much of my abilities. One thing I resolved was that he’d never find out the truth.”
Taylor’s ARPA money had turned Utah into a hotbed of computer graphics. Kay discovered that the day he walked into Evans’s office to meet his new mentor. Evans, an introverted gentleman of few words, reached over to a foot-high stack of documents bound in brown paper piled on his desk. He handed one to Kay and said, “Take this and read it.”
The title read, “Sketchpad: A Man-Machine Graphical Communications System.” The 1963 MIT doctoral thesis of Ivan Sutherland, Taylor’s predecessor at IPTO, the paper described a program that had become the cornerstone of the young science of interactive computer graphics. Sketchpad worked on only one machine in the world, Wes Clark’s TX-2 at Lincoln Lab. But its precepts were infinitely applicable to a whole range of increasingly nimble and powerful computers then coming into existence. Sketchpad was also, by Evans’s mandate, the cardinal introduction to computing in his doctoral program. “Basically,” Kay said, “you had to understand that before you were a real person at Utah.”
Sutherland’s system could create graphic objects of dazzling complexity, all the more amazing given the severe limitations of the contemporary hardware. With Sketchpad the user could skew straight lines into curves (“rubber-banding”), make engineering-precise lines and angles (the system straightened out the draftsman’s rough sketches), and zoom the display resolution in and out. The program pioneered the “virtual desktop,” in which the user sketched on the visible portion of a theoretical drawing space about one-third of a mile square (the invisible portions were held in the computer’s memory and could be scrolled into view). Contemplating the power of Sketchpad was “like seeing a glimpse of heaven,” Kay said later. “It had all of the kinds of things that the computer seemed to promise. You could think of it as a light that was sort of showing us the way.”
That graphics could be a directly manipulable—and minutely personalized—element of the computer interface was one of dozens of new concepts that bombarded Kay in his first few weeks at Utah. His mind on fire, he spent hours in the library stacks photocopying everything that grabbed his interest in the computing literature. He emerged with hundreds of articles, virtually a living history of computing for his parched intellect to absorb.
He soon came under other powerful influences. At one conference he heard the oracular Marvin Minsky speak. Minsky was an MIT psychologist and a computing pioneer, a disciple of the child psychologist Jean Piaget and a founder of the new science of artificial intelligence, which aimed to reproduce human psychology in the computer. His speech was a “terrific diatribe” about how traditional education destroys the learning aptitude of children, a subject that must have resounded to the precocious Kay’s very soul. Minsky did not specifically prescribe computers as the answer. But he made intriguing mention of the work a colleague had done in designing a computer language to help children learn programming.
Early the next year Kay got to meet this colleague. Seymour Papert was a burly, bushy-bearded South African, a Cambridge-trained mathematician who managed to combine a single-minded absorption with the learning skills of children with a profound absent-mindedness about everything else. Papert had devised a simple programming language known as “LOGO,” the aim of which was to teach children about computers by giving them a tool to see the machine instantaneously respond to their commands. LOGO literally turned the computer into a toy. Its most conspicuous feature was a turtle-shaped robot the size of a dinner plate. This device would crawl about on a schoolroom floor according to simple commands children could type onto a computer screen: “forward 100” directed it in a straight line 100 turtle steps, “right 90” dictated a 90-degree right turn, and so on. A pen protruding from the turtle’s belly would trace its path on the floor, allowing the more adept of its young programmers to create patterns of almost limitless intricacy.
LOGO’s genius was its ability to turn the abstract (one can command a computer to do something) into the concrete (one can direct the turtle to draw a parallelogram). To Kay it was a revelation to watch Papert’s ten-, eleven-, and twelve-year-old subjects use a simple computer to create designs one would otherwise assume could only be achieved by mainframe systems loaded with complex algorithms. Papert showed the way toward reducing the machine from demigod to tool (in Wes Clark’s phrase) by subjecting it to the unforgiving scrutiny of children. Kay never forgot the lesson. As he wrote later, “The best outputs that time-sharing can provide are crude green-tinted line drawings and square-wave musical tones. Children, however, are used to finger paints, color television and stereophonic records, and they usually find the things that can be accomplished with a low-capacity time-sharing system insufficiently stimulating to maintain their interest.” Or as Kay and his colleague Adele Goldberg wrote later: “If ‘the medium is the message,’ then the message of low-bandwidth time-sharing is ‘blah.’”
When his turn came to design a programming language at PARC, he would invest it with several unmistakable elements of Papert’s system: its visual feedback, its accessibility to novices, and its orientation to the wonder and creativity of childhood. Partially in deference to this last factor, he would call it “Smalltalk.”
While Kay was taking these first mind-blowing excursions into Ideaspace, the caliber of graphics research at Utah was exploding. Ivan Sutherland had joined the faculty to work with his friend Dave Evans (they would eventually form a partnership to manufacture interactive military simulators). Kay’s fellow grad student John Warnock achieved a graphics milestone by solving the famous “hidden-line problem,” which applied to how computers could draw the outline of a form when it is partially hidden behind another—the sides of a triangle hidden behind a ball, for example—so all the visible sides and angles convincingly line up. (Warnock’s solution is a tour de force of such compactness that his doctoral thesis, in which it is described, runs to only 32 pages.)
Kay’s own 1969 thesis incorporated these ideas and others into what must be one of the oddest dissertations ever submitted for a doctorate in a scientific discipline, featuring as it did epigraphs from, among others, W. H. Auden, J. S. Bach, and Kahlil Gibran (“You would touch with your fingers the naked body of your dreams”). The hand-drawn illustrations included not only complex diagrams of functions and logical trees but line drawings of fanciful single-user machines. These had screen, keyboard, and mouse unified into a desktop console, a big brother to the portable all-purpose computer that had provoked such controversy when he described it at the ARPA grad students’ conference two years earlier.
Kay’s thesis outlined an interactive computer called the FLEX machine which he had designed in partnership with an unsung hardware genius named Ed Cheadle, who was an important engineer for a Salt Lake aerospace company. The FLEX incorporated many of the ideas Kay would develop in the coming years at PARC, including compactness, object-oriented programming, and the use of a display screen. But it was not quite the personal computer he envisioned, in part because it was not powerful enough to perform all the functions required by his ideal and in part because it utilized a complicated and stilted language which, as Kay recalled, “users found repellent to learn.”
Despite its idiosyncrasies (or because of them), Kay’s thesis readily passed the muster of a five-man committee that included Sutherland and Evans. But he was tormented by a sense of things half-done. Parts of his FLEX machine could be implemented on existing hardware, but a truly suitable technology seemed to be tantalizingly just out of reach. “The big whammy for me came during a conference tour of the University of Illinois, where I saw a one-inch-square lump of glass and neon gas in which individual spots would light up on command—it was the first flat-panel display. I spent the rest of the conference calculating just when the silicon of the FLEX could be put on the back of the display.” The answer, according to Moore’s Law, seemed to be at least ten years off.
If contemporary machines were inadequate, Kay’s goals had not changed. The quest was still for something simple enough for a child to use yet powerful enough to slake the human thirst for creativity. Kay imagined an invention called the “KiddiComp” or “Dynabook.” To make the abstraction tangible, he built himself a model box about nine inches by twelve and a half inches deep, with a flat screen and keyboard drawn on the top surface, and filled it with lead pellets as a way of divining its optimum weight (about two pounds, he judged).
He was at loose ends, depressed over having failed to make his great idea materialize in more than cardboard form. While holding a temporary appointment at the Stanford artificial intelligence lab he underwent a year of gestalt therapy (“a very California thing to do”). He was on the verge of accepting a post at Carnegie-Mellon when Bob Taylor called him with the electrifying news that Lampson, Thacker, and several of their BCC colleagues were joining Xerox PARC en masse. Kay reconsidered his plans. Butler Lampson was one of his intellectual heroes. Through the ARPA grad student conferences he knew the others as first-class talents. If all these people were to converge at PARC under Bob Taylor, there was no telling what they could accomplish—even build his Dynabook.
One night he and Taylor stayed up nearly until dawn, batting around the possibilities implicit in a conjuncture of Xerox’s money, Kay’s ideas, and the engineering of Lampson and Thacker. A computer simple enough to be worked by children! Small enough to be carried under your arm! Powerful enough to drive a display in full color! There was only one thing, Taylor informed him at some point. Kay would not be assigned with the others to his lab, but to the competing Systems Science Lab under Bill Gunning.
Much has been made of Taylor’s motives in keeping Kay out of his own lab. Some believe Taylor wished to place a “ringer” in the rival SSL—a “colonization,” Kay said, “so two of the four labs at PARC would have ex-ARPA people” to more effectively propagate his ideas throughout the organization. It is just as likely that Taylor’s BCC coup had filled CSL’s allotted head count for the moment. Since he was advising Gunning on recruitment anyway, there was nothing untoward in offering him Alan Kay.
It is also certain that landing in Gunning’s SSL was Kay’s lucky break. He tended to work as a loner—either by himself or as leader of a small team. Could he have maintained his intellectual autonomy in CSL, where the only group was Taylor’s and the intellectual engine was Butler Lampson? Working out of SSL allowed Kay to work as a full participant in CSL’s program without ceding his independent spirit. He could interact with CSL as a privileged equal, outside Taylor’s direct supervision and Lampson’s intellectual domination.
As events unfolded, Kay and Taylor apart proved more powerful a force than they would have been together. Where Taylor could be vague and inarticulate in describing computing’s future, Kay was never less than crystal-clear. The day he came to PARC for his job interview, Rick Jones invited him into his office and asked him a stock question.
“What do you think your greatest achievement will be at PARC?” he asked.
“It’ll be a personal computer,” Kay replied.
“What’s that?”
Spying a flat portfolio on Jones’s desk the size of a student’s notebook, Kay seized it and flipped it open. “This will be a flat-panel display,” he said, indicating the cover, which he held upright. “There’ll be a keyboard here on the bottom, and enough power to store your mail, files, music, artwork, and books. All in a package about this size and weighing a couple of pounds. That’s what I’m talking about.”
He walked out, leaving Jones scratching his head and saying to himself, “Yeah, right.”
With Kay’s arrival the computer research team at PARC achieved critical mass. They had the people and the leadership, a seemingly unlimited amount of money, and Xerox’s liberal commission to pursue whatever course of inquiry they wished.
All they needed now to start work was a computer. Pake gave them a month or so to study the available alternatives before recommending a system to be used by the entire research center. But in making their choice they provoked the first great donnybrook of PARC’s young existence.