Hacker Friendly

There’s an excellent interview on CIO Insight with Alan Kay, one of the fathers of modern computing.

Most of the ideas in that sphere, good ideas that would apply to business, were written down 40 years ago by Engelbart. But in the last few years I’ve been asking computer scientists and programmers whether they’ve ever typed E-N-G-E-L-B-A-R-T into Google-and none of them have. I don’t think you could find a physicist who has not gone back and tried to find out what Newton actually did. It’s unimaginable. Yet the computing profession acts as if there isn’t anything to learn from the past, so most people haven’t gone back and referenced what Engelbart thought.

He goes on to talk about how we’re so immersed in the PC desktop paradigm that it’s difficult for designers to imagine where to go next, and how the One Laptop Per Child project is an attempt to get children interested in the full potential of the network-attached computer. Great stuff.