Alan Kay interviewed for the TV series
The Machine that Changed the World

Some people thought they were never going to get any smaller. There were calculations about how many Empire State buildings you needed full of vacuum tubes to do this and that. Other people at Bell Labs, who had been working on the transistor, had a sense that this could be used as a switch, because AT&T wanted something to replace vacuum tubes.

So there were several perceptions of how big the thing was going to be. I think it wasn't until the sixties that people started thinking that computers could get quite small.

When they were doing ballistic calculations, there was this notion that you would run a program for a very long time. It was really after UNIVAC in the 1950s that people started thinking, "Oh, they might have to do some programming." And people, most notably Grace Hopper, very early on started thinking about higher level programming languages.

So that was one flow. And the other thing was the urgency of the Cold War got people thinking of air defense. Scientists at MIT started working on systems that could assess radar and show it to you on a display. Those are the first computers that had displays and pointing devices.

I always thought of it as something like a factory. You have this very large thing, and there are raw ingredients going in the front, and there are some very complex processes that have to be coordinated. Then sometime later, you get what you were hoping for on the out of the rear end.

You can think of them also as like a railroad. Somebody else is deciding the schedules. I can certainly remember having maybe one run a day, or two runs a day, and you could only get your results then, and you had to work around it and so forth. It was very much of an institutional way of thinking about computing.

I don't think so. You know, happiness is how much reality exceeds expectations. I think that most people were happy.

In the '50s, predominantly, business computing was done with punch card machines. And IBM was the company that made those punch card machines. So there was an enormous disparity between what you could do with computers and what most people did.

My feeling is that anything that is larger than human scale invokes mechanisms concerned with religion. So you have a priesthood with white coats, all the paraphernalia were there. Some people thought it would take over the world, and some people wanted it to take over the world, and some people were afraid it would take over the world. None of those things happened. But that was what it was when it was this large thing.

Towards the late '50s, many people in different places started saying, "Well, this thing has the potential of being more like a partner. Maybe a complementary partner. It can do some things that we can't do well, and vice versa. So we should find some way of bringing it down to human scale.

The partner to people, not so much directly connected to the institutions. Although of course, the first way it was done using time-sharing, the mainframe was still owned by the institution.

In the late '50s there were a variety of different conceptions of what you should do with it. Some of those conceptions were had by the very same person.

So for instance, John McCarthy, who is a professor at MIT, both wrote memos suggesting we should time-share the computer, and he also thought more into the future, that we'd be all networked together, and there would be these huge information utilities. It would be like our power and lighting utilities that would give us the entire wealth of the knowledge of man. He suggested on that, what we'd have to have is something like an intelligent agent. An entity, not maybe as smart as us, but an expert in finding things. We would have to give it advice. He called it the "advice-taker."

Well, I think that was it. They cost several million dollars back then. People had been fooling around with things little bit like time-sharing before the sort-of official invention of it at MIT. Part of it was just to debug programs. The idea is that debugging is one of the most painful processes.

Incidentally, you probably know that there was actually a bug. The first bug was a moth, I think found by Grace Hopper. And a friend of mine just recently was having trouble with his laser printer. And nothing that they thought of could possibly work, and finally somebody decided to open it up and look in it, and what it was, was a mouse. The mouse had moved in, it was nice and warm. It had, on top of the circuit board, set up various places. And of course nobody understood what I meant when I said that this guy's computer has a mouse problem. Cause mice don't have problems. So, it's an ill wind that blows nobody good.

The idea was that when humans use computers, the best way of having them use it, is instead of using all the power for five minutes a day, take those five minutes of computer power and spread it out over several hours. Because people are slow at typing, and when you're debugging you don't need to do long runs of things.

And what you want is lots of interaction, lots of finding out that you're wrong and this is wrong, you can make a little change and this is wrong. So you want to go from something that requires enormous planning to something that is much more incremental. And this is the urge that the people who developed time-sharing had.

Well, you couldn't. So the idea is that if the thing cost several million dollars, as McCarthy pointed out, one of the things that you could do is roll in one person's job and do it for a couple of seconds, then roll in another person's job and do it for a couple of seconds. If you had a fast enough disk for holding all of these jobs then you would be able to handle twenty, thirty or more people at once, and they wouldn't feel that the lag of a few seconds was going to hurt them.

Well, that's the way it's supposed to work. And of course, the thing that drove personal computing in the '60s into existence was that it proved to be extremely difficult to get reliable response time.

Yes, indeed. In fact, the best one of these was a system called JOSS at RAND Corporation, in which the system was devoted entirely to running this single language. That made things much better. The language was designed for end users. It was the first thing that affected people the way spreadsheets do today.

It had eight users on this 1950s machine, but the guy who did it, Cliff Shaw, was a real artist. The feeling of using this system was unlike that of using anything else on a computer. People who used that system thought of wanting all of their computing to have the same kind of aesthetic, warm feeling that you had when using JOSS.

You know, these things go in waves. In the '50s, the emphasis was first on being able to do things incrementally. Second, people wanted to share. So the idea of electronic mail was very early at MIT. And at some point people started thinking that the form of interaction started to have a lot to do with how good you felt, and how puzzled you were and so forth.

The invention of modern computer graphics by Ivan Sutherland in 1962 had a lot to do with people's perceptions. Because once you saw that, you couldn't go back. It established a whole new way of thinking about computer interaction, and to this day it has remained an inspiration.

Yes, he had gone to Carnegie Tech, now Carnegie Mellon, and came to MIT to do his Ph.D. work. One of his advisors was Claude Shannon, and another one was Marvin Minsky. As he has told the story several times, they were then in just the early stages of Jack Licklider's dream to have the computer be a sort of a symbiotic partner.

And when he went out to Lincoln Labs people were starting to think about that. There was a marvelous machine there called the TX-2. This was one of the last computers in the US large enough to have its own roof. It was one of these enormous machines, originally built for the air defense system. And Ivan made friends with people there, and started thinking about something having to do with computer graphics.

The air defense system used displays for putting up radar plots and so forth. Light guns were already around and so forth. He started thinking about maybe doing a drafting system. As I recall it, one of his original reactions when seeing the kind of graphics you could put on a screen — because the screens couldn't even draw lines; when they put up a line it was put up with lots of individual dots, and done fairly slowly, so it would flicker and it was pretty awful looking — Ivan at that point said the best words a computer scientist can ever say, which is, "What else can it do?"

In fact, having the display not be great helped what he tried to do on it, because he started thinking of what was the actual power and value of the computer. Now today we have a problem because the displays are good, so our tendency is to simulate paper. But what Ivan started thinking about, is what kind of value could the computer bring to the transaction so it would be even worthwhile to sit down and use such an awful looking display.

And the thing he came out with was that the computer could help complete the drawings. This is where the idea of Sketchpad came from — you could sketch something in. If you were trying to make a flange, you just put in the lines for the flange, and then you would tell Sketchpad to make all of these angles right angles. And you could make these two things proportional to each other and so forth. And Sketchpad would solve the problem, and straighten out the drawing in front of your eyes into something that was more like what you wanted.

So that was a terrific idea. And then he took it another step further, because he realized he could solve real-world problems. So if you put a bridge into Sketchpad — it'd never been told about bridges before — but you could put bridges in and tell Sketchpad about pulling and pushing of things and hang a weight on the bridge, and Sketchpad would generate the stresses and strains on the bridge. So it was now acting as a simulation. Put in an electric circuit — Sketchpad had never heard about electric circuits before — but you could put in Ohm's law, and what batteries do, and in order to settle the constraints...

Or one of the nicest things was you could put in mechanical linkages. So you could do something like a reciprocating arm on a locomotive wheel, for going from reciprocating to circular motion. And Sketchpad's problem solver, if it had a problem that it couldn't get an exact solution for, there wasn't just one solution — and of course there isn't for this — what it would do is iterate through all the solutions, so it would actually animate this thing, and right on the screen you would see this thing animating. It was the very thing that you were thinking of.

'62, yeah. You can't buy a system today that does all the things that Sketchpad could back then. That's what's really amazing. It was the first system that had a window, first system that had icons. Certainly the first system to do all of its interaction through the display itself.

For a small number of people in this community, the Advanced Research Projects Agency research community, this system was like seeing a glimpse of heaven. Because it had all of the kinds of things that the computer seemed to promise in the '50s. Practically everything that was done in the '60s in that community, and into the '70s, had this enormous shadow cast by Sketchpad. Or you could maybe think of it better as a light that was showing us the way.

Yes, and he was also funded by the Advanced Research Projects Agency, and his original proposal I think was also 1962. 1962 is one of those amazing years.

Engelbart had read about the Memex device that Vannevar Bush, who was President Roosevelt's science advisor and a former professor at MIT, he had written an article in 1945 called "As We May Think." Most of the article was devoted to predictions of the future and one of them was, he said that sometime in the future we'll have in our home a thing like a desk and inside the desk on optical storage will be the contents of a small town library, like 5,000 books. There'll be multiple screens, there'll be pointing devices, and ways of getting information in, and pointing to things that are there. He said that you can form trails that will connect one piece of information to another. He invented a profession called "pathfinding". There'd be people called Pathfinders who sold paths. You could buy a path that would connect some set of interesting things to some other set of interesting things.

So, this is a complete vision in 1945. And a lot of people read that. I read it in the '50s when I was a teenager because I had seen it referred to in a science fiction story. Engelbart had read it fairly early, when he was in military service. Once you read that thing you couldn't get it out of your mind, because the thing that anybody who deals with knowledge would desperately like to have.

So Engelbart in the early '60s started writing proposals, and he finally got ARPA interested in funding it. And they started building a proposal of his. A couple of years later, 1964, he invented the mouse, to have both a better pointing device than the light pen, and a cheaper one. They built a system that by 1968 was able to give a very large-scale demonstration, to 3,000 people in San Francisco.

I was there.

I had seen the system beforehand, because of course I was a graduate student in this community. But still, even having seen the system, the scale of the demo and the impact it had, was unbelievable.

I remember it started off — there was about 3,000 people in this auditorium at the Fall Joint Computer Conference — and all you could see on the stage was this figure with something in his lap and a box in front of him and a couple of things that looked like TV cameras around him.

He had on a headset and he started talking. He said, "I'd like to welcome you to our demonstration," and all of a sudden his face appeared 20 by 30 feet wide on this enormous screen, because they borrowed one of the first video projectors, they used this huge situation display. And then they used video editing so you could see while he was giving this demonstration what he was doing with his hands, with the mouse on the key set, what was going on on the screen and so forth. And that is video taped. It's something that you can use for your—

Douglas Engelbart started off just showing us how you could point to things on the screen and indicate them. He started off actually fairly simply, just showing how you could look at information in various ways.

He showed something very much like HyperCard. He had a little map of how he was going to go home that night — he was going to go to the library and the grocery store and the drug store and so forth. You could click on each one of those things, and it would pop up and show him what he had to get there. What he demonstrated were the early stages of what we call hypertext today. Lots of response in the system.

One of the big shockers was midway through the thing, he started doing some collaborative work. All of a sudden, in an insert on the screen, you saw the picture of Bill Paxton who was 45 miles away down in Menlo Park. Live. Both of them had their mouse pointers on the screen, and they were actually doing the kinds of things that people still dream about today.

So this was a complete vision. I think of it as the vision of what we today call personal computing or desktop computing. Except for the fact that the processor was a big time-shared computer, all of the paraphernalia — Engelbart used a black-and-white 19-inch display, using video to blow up a calligraphic screen; it had a mouse — if you looked at the thing today, you'd see something that looked like somebody's office that you could walk into.

What remained was to do something about the the problems in response time and all that. That was something that I had gotten interested in a few years before. And the first machine that I did was a thing called the FLEX machine and...

As I recall, I had the flu or something, but I was determined to go see this thing. ARPA had spent something like $175,000 on this demo and everybody in the ARPA community wanted to show up. He got a standing ovation, and he won the best paper at the Fall Joint Computing Conference and so forth. And what was even better is that he had brought up four or five terminals to this system and had them in a room, and people could go in and actually learn to interact with the system a bit. So it was a large scale demonstration.

I don't think that anybody has ever traced what people did over the next 15 or 20 years as a result of having been at that demonstration. That would be interesting.

Well, we thought of Doug as Moses opening the Red Sea. He was like a biblical prophet. And like a biblical prophet, he believed very much in his own particular vision. And that vision was not a 100 percent good idea.

One of the things that they neglected completely was the learnability of the system. People who used the system were all computer experts who loved it, and were willing to memorize hundreds of commands. If you memorized hundreds of commands and you learned how to use the key set, you could fly through this n-dimensional space. It was quite exhilarating to watch people doing this, and exhilarating to learn how to do it. The problem with it though was that there were so many barriers towards learning.

And there were many other things that were problems. It wasn't a particularly good simulation of paper, partly because he didn't want it to be. And so the idea that there would be a transition period where you would be producing documents... Of course, they printed documents out, but there was no notion of desktop publishing there.

The whole system was rather like a violin. If you were willing to learn how to become a violinist, you could play incredible music through the thing. And of course all of us were so completely sold on this system in the late '60s. The first machine that I did, the FLEX Machine, was an echo of this.

Oh yes, The first personal computer in my opinion, was the machine called the LINC. If you include size as one of the important things. Of course, you could say that the Whirlwind was a personal computer at MIT, or the TX-2. Some people tried to get Ivan Sutherland to write a paper called "When There Was Only One Personal Computer." And that was him using Sketchpad on the TX-2, which is this thing bigger than a house.

But in 1962 Wes Clark did a machine in which part of the design parameters was it was small enough to look over when you're sitting down at a desk. So, it was not supposed to loom over you. It was something you could actually see over.

Many important things were done on that machine. In fact quite, quite a few hundred, if not a few thousand, of them were built and used in the biomedical community. It was designed for biomedical research, designed to be programmed by its users who were not computer scientists, even designed to be built by non-computer scientists. They used to have gatherings in the summertime where 30 people or so would come and build their own LINCs and then take them back. It was great little machine. It had a little display and display editors and so forth. And so it was something that you could point to when you were trying to think of what to do.

And there were other small things. There was a machine called the IBM 1130, which was really an abortion of a machine. It was sort of a keypunch keyboard hooked to one of the early removable disc packs. This was a mess of a machine. But it was the size of a desk, and you could sit down. It wasn't designed really to be programmed except by storing programs on cards. Very funny, you could only store data on the disc. IBM forced you to put the programs on punchcards, and that was the only way you could feed them in, it was really hilarious. So there were lots of different kinds of things like that.

I worked on this machine with a guy by the name of Ed Cheadle, who was really trying to invent what today we would call personal computing. He had a little machine, and he had a little Sony television set. What he wanted was something for engineers — he was an engineer — that would allow them to flexibly do calculations beyond the kinds of things that you do with a calculator. So you should be able to program the machine in something. You should be able to store the programs away. You should be able to get it to do things.

And then I sort of came and corrupted the design by wanting it to be for people other than engineers. I'd seen JOSS, and I'd also recently seen one of the first object-oriented programming languages, and I realized how important that could be. The problem was that he and I got along really well, and so we escalated this design beyond the means of the time to build it practically.

But we did build one, and it had many things that people associate today. It fit on top of a desk — special desks, because it weighed hundred of pounds. It had a fan likened to a 747 taking off, because the integrated circuits back then had maybe 8 or 16 gates on a chip. So this thing had about 700 chips in it. It had a high-resolution, calligraphic display. It had a tablet on it. And it had a user interface that included multiple windows, things like icons and stuff.

But it was rather like trying to make an apple pie from random things that you find in the kitchen. Like, no flour, so you grind up Cheerios. You wind up with this thing that looks sort of like an apple pie, but actually isn't very palatable. So the result of this machine was a technological success and a sociological disaster. And it was the magnitude of the rejection by non-computer people we tried it on, that got me thinking about user interface for the first time. And I realized that what Cliff Shaw had done in JOSS was not a luxury, but a necessity. And so it led to other ways of looking at things.

I think one of the ways that we commonly thought about Engelbart's stuff was he was trying to be Henry Ford. You could think of the computer as a railroad, and the liberating thing for a railroad is the personal automobile. Engelbart thought of what you were doing on his system as traveling. You're moving around from link to link in hyperspace. And he used terms like "thought vectors in concept space". Nobody knew what it meant, and I'm not sure he did either, but it was that kind of a metaphor.

I don't think there is anything particularly wrong with it. But when you're doing things by analogy, you always want to pick the right analogy, because there's so many ways of making them. The thing that was limiting about it, when you apply it to humanity, as an example, is a car you expect to take a few months to learn how to do it, that was certainly true. It's something that doesn't extend into the world of the child. There's a whole bunch of things, but of course we didn't think of it that way. We thought of the car as one of the great things of the 20th century and it changed our society. So, we were definitely using that as a metaphor.

In fact, the thing that changed my mind had nothing to do with rejecting the car as a metaphor. It was finding a better metaphor, one that was completely possessed me. That came about from seeing quite a different system. I had called the FLEX machine a personal computer. I think that was the first use of that term. While I was trying to figure out what was wrong with it I happened to visit RAND Corporation over here in Santa Monica and saw sort of a follow-on system to JOSS that they had done for their end users who were people like RAND economists. These people loved JOSS, but they hated to type.

And so, in the same year the mouse was invented, the RAND people had invented the first really good tablet. It was a high-resolution thing, and they decided that the thing to do was to get rid of keyboards entirely. And so the first really good hand character recognizer was developed there. And they built an entire system out of it called GRAIL, for GRAphical Input Language. There's no keyboard at all. You interacted directly with the things on the screen. You could move them around. If you drew a square, it recognized you were trying to draw a square, it would make one. If you put in your hand-printed characters, it would recognize them and straighten them up. The system was designed for building simulations of the kinds that economists and other scientists would like to build.

Using this system was completely different from using the Engelbart system. It felt like you were sinking your fingers right through the glass of the display and touching the information structures directly inside. If what Engelbart was doing was the dawn of personal computing, what the RAND people were doing was the dawn of intimate computing.

One of the things that completely took hold of me in using the GRAIL system was it felt more like a musical instrument than anything. Most musicians don't think of their instruments as machines. It's that closeness of contact, the fitness, that you're directly dealing with content rather than the form of the content, that possessed me very strongly.

That was in 1968 as well, and I saw another several things. I saw Seymour Papert's early work with LOGO. Here were children writing programs. And that happened because they had taken great care to combine the power of the computer with an easy-to-use language. In fact they used the RAND JOSS as a model, and used the power of LISP which had been developed a few years before as an artificial intelligence language, put them together, and that was the early LOGO.

To see children confidently programming just blew out the whole notion of the automobile metaphor. And the thing that replaced it was that this is a medium. This is like pencil and paper. We can't wait until the kids are seniors in high school to give them driver's ed. They have to start using it practically from birth the way they use pencil and paper.

And it was destined not to be packaged on the desktop, because we don't carry our desks with us. It had to be something much smaller. That was when I first started seriously thinking about a notebook computer. And of course the first thing I wanted to know, after deciding that it had to be no larger than this [notebook], was, when would that be possible, if ever?

So I started looking at what the integrated circuit people were doing, Gordon Moore and Bob Noyce and so on. There were these nice projections that they had made, as confident physicists, about where silicon can go. And what's wonderful is, these projections have only been off by a few percent, now more than 20 years later.

Of course, I was very enthusiastic. I would believe anything that was in the right direction. So I took this hook, line, and sinker. I said, okay, 20 years from now, we'll be able to have a notebook-sized computer that we can not only do all the wonderful things on computers, we can do mundane things too. Because that's what paper is all about. You can write a Shakespearean sonnet on it, but you can also put your grocery list on it.

So one of the questions I asked back in 1968 is, what kind of a computer would it have it to be for you to do something so mundane as to put your grocery list on it, be willing to carry it into a supermarket, and be willing to carry it out with a couple of bags of groceries? There is nothing special about that. You can do it with paper. See, the question is not whether you replace paper or not. The question is whether you can cover the old medium with the new. And then you have all these marvelous things that you can do with the new medium that you can't do with the old.

Most of my thoughts about media were shaped by reading McLuhan, which not everybody agrees with. But one of his points is that the notion of intermediary is not something that is added on to humans. It's sort of what we are. We deal with the world through intermediaries. We can't fit the world into our brain. We don't have a one-to-one representation of the world in our brain. We have something that is an abstraction from it. The very representations that our mentality uses to deal with the world are intermediaries. We kind of live in a waking hallucination.

We have language as an intermediary. We have clothes as an intermediary. This whole notion of what we think of as "technology" could also be replaced by the word "medium." Even though media has a connotation of the news business and stuff like that, I think it's an awfully good word because it gives us this notion of something being between us and direct experience.

The trade off with using any kind of intermediary is that any time you put something between you and direct experience, you're alienating a bit. What you hope to get back from it is some kind of amplification.

Various people who have studied evolution talk about the difference between the direct experience you get from kinesthetically touching something to the indirect experience you get of seeing it. One is less involving than the other. The seeing is a good one because it means you don't have to test out every cliff by walking over it. There's an enormous survival value about stepping back. To have a brain that can plan and envision things that might happen, whether as images or even more strongly in terms of symbols, is of tremendous survival value because it allows you to try out many more alternatives.

As the existentialists of this century have pointed out, we have gained our power over the world at the cost of alienating ourselves.

"Machine" is a word that has a connotation that's unfortunate. Maybe what we should do is either elevate what we think of when you say "machine", you know, mechanism kind of thing, or maybe use a different word.

To most scientists, machines are not a dirty word. One of the ways we think about things, even in biology these days, is that what we are is an immensely complicated mechanism. That's not to say that it's predictable, in the sense of free will. Because there's this notion now people are familiar with which is called chaotic systems, systems that are somewhat unstable. There's a lot of instability and stuff built in. It's a little more stochastic in a way.

But the idea that there are things operating against each other and they make larger things and those things are part of larger things, and so forth, to most scientists it seems like a beautiful thing. It's not a derogatory term.

The connotation of machine is something that has to do with the physical world. Most people who most people haven't learned mathematics, have never encountered the notion of an of an algorithm. You could think of it as moving around physical things called symbols. I mean something physical is always being moved around, that's the way scientists look at the world.

And it's the real question is, is this a trivial example of it or is this an unbelievably interesting example of it? So a flower is a very interesting example of a machine, and a lever is a somewhat trivial and more understandable notion of a machine.

Lots of things, yeah. One way to think of it is that a lot of the what a computer is, is markings. And just as it doesn't matter whether you make the markings for a book on metal or paper or clay — all kinds of ways of making the equivalent of a book — the main thing about a marking is you have to have some way of distinguishing it from other markings. Once you've got that, then they can act as carriers of different kinds of descriptions. The range of the markings that you can have in a book, and the range of markings you can have in a computer are the same.

Yeah, it doesn't matter what it is. There's a wonderful computer built out of Tinker Toy in the computer museum in Boston. It was done by some MIT grad students. You can make it out of anything.

So that's one set of ideas, that the representational properties of things are very much like a book. But then the computer has this even more wonderful thing — it's a book that can read and write itself. And moreover it can do it very quickly. So it has this self-reflexivity that you usually only find in biological systems. And it can carry through these descriptions very, very rapidly.

That's the big nirvana experience, where you suddenly realize "Holy Smokes, this thing is a pocket universe." It has a nice complementary role to the way we deal with our physical universe as scientists. The physical universe, especially in the nineteenth century, was thought that it was put there by God, and it was the job of scientists to uncover this glorious mechanism.

In the computer, what you do is you start off with a theory, and the computer will bring that theory to life. So you can have a theory of the universe that is different than our own, like it has an inverse cube law of gravity. You can sit down and, in not too much time, you can program up a simulation of that, and discover right away that you don't get orbits anymore with planets. That's curious. A little more thinking and deeper delving will soon make you discover that only the inverse square law will actually give you orbits.

Yes. It's again the difference between a physical book, which you can drop and will fall down to the floor, and the story that's in the book that could be about a place that has no gravity, like out in space. The computer is a physical thing, but the stories that it holds don't have to have anything to do with the physical universe its components reside in. In other words, you can lie, both with books and with computers.

It's important, because if you couldn't lie, you couldn't get into the future. We are living a world of things that were complete lies 500 years ago.

Yes, I called it the first meta-medium in the early '70s when I was trying to explain how it was distinct from big mainframes with whirling tape drives.

The physical media that we have like paper, and the way it takes on markings, are fairly easy to simulate. The higher the resolution of the display, the more you can make things look like a high-resolution television camera looking at paper. That was one of the things that we were interested in at at Xerox PARC, to do that kind of simulation.

And there are deeper simulations than the simulation of physical media. There's the simulation of physical processes, as well.

Right. It's sort of sneaking its way in, the way the book did. The Catholic Church thought that the book might be a way of getting more bibles written in Latin. By the time they started thinking about suppressing it, it was too late. Because, of course, you could print all these other things. All of a sudden, you go from having 300 or 400 books in the Vatican Library in the year 1400, to 100 or 150 years later where there are some 40,000 different books in circulation in Europe, and 80 percent of the population could read them.

All of a sudden you have something totally at odds with most ways of dealing with religion, which is multiple points of view.

In doing these analogies... Analogies can be suggestive. And of course, the the amount that analogy carries through from one place to another depends on lots of things.

I happen to like the analogy to the book quite a bit, because you have several stages. You have the invention of writing, which is a huge idea, incredibly important. The difference between having it and not having it is enormous. The difference between having computers, even if they're just big mainframes, and not having them, is enormous. There're just things you cannot do without them.

Then, the next stage was the Gutenberg stage. Just as McLuhan liked to say, when a new medium comes along it imitates the old. Gutenberg's books were the same size as these beautiful illuminated manuscripts that were done by hand.

In the libraries of the day, the books generally weren't shelved. There were so few books in a given library that they actually had their own reading table. If you look at woodcuts of the day, it looks for all the world like a time-sharing bullpen. There's one library in Florence that's set up that way. You go over to the table that the particular book is at. And they are chained in, because they were too valuable. They were priceless.

And Gutenberg imitated that. Of course, he could produce many more books. But he didn't know what size they should be. It was some decades later that Aldus Manutius, who was a Venetian publisher, decided that books should be this size [small]. He decided they should be this size because that was the size that saddle bags were in Venice in the late 1400s.

The key idea that he had was that books could now be lost. And because books could now be lost, they could now be taken with you. And they couldn't be this size [big]. They had to be something that was a portable size.

I think, in very important respects, where we are today is before Aldus. Because this notion that a computer can be lost is not one that we like yet. You know, we protect our computers. We bolt them to the desk and so forth. Still quite expensive. They'll be really valuable when we can lose them.

Right. If reading and writing is a profession, you don't have the notion of literacy and illiteracy. There's no word in our language that stands for "il-medicine." There is medicine, which is practiced by professionals, and there is no notion of il-medicine. Now, if we all learned medicine — and it may be someday that staying healthy becomes an important part of everyone's life — then there'll be a notion of medicine and il-medicine. And so it wasn't until there was a potential for the masses to read that we had the notion of literacy and illiteracy.

To me, literacy has three major parts that you have to contend with. One is you have to have the skill to access material prepared for you by somebody else, regardless of what it is that you're you're trying to be literate in. In print mediums it's called reading or accessing.

But I don't think many people in our society would think that a person who just could read was literate. You have to be able to create ideas and put them into the information stream. So you have creative literacy, which is the equivalent of writing.

And then finally, after a medium has been around for awhile, you have the problem that there are different genres. You have to go into a different gear to read a Shakespearian play. There's a different way of doing it. The way they wrote essays 200 years ago is different than the way they write essays today. So you have to have some sort of literacy in the different styles for representing things.

When something new comes along — since we're talking about media, we could talk about "mediacy" and "il-mediacy," or "computeracy" and "il-computeracy" — each one of those three things is a problem that has to be solved. There's the problem of, when you get something new, made for a computer, how can you do the equivalent of reading, of accessing what it is. You go to a computer store and get some new wonderful thing, slap it into your computer, and if you have to learn a new language in order to use the thing, then things are not set up for you being computer literate.

I think it has a lot to do with that. To sort of strain the analogy we're making with with printing, my other hero back then was Martin Luther, who a few years later had this intense desire to let people have a personal relationship with God without going through the intermediaries of the church. He wanted people to be able to read the bible in their own language. And he knew that German, which was a bunch of different regional dialects back then, mostly for talking about farming and stuff, was not going to be able to carry the weight of the bible as it was portrayed in Latin, which is a much more robust and mature language.

So Martin Luther had to invent the language we today call High German, before he could translate the bible into it. The language that Germans speak today is in a very large part the invention of a single person, who did it as a user interface, so that he could bring the media much closer to the people, rather trying to get everybody in Germany to learn Latin.

Right, it's partly that things are going more rapidly. But also to the extent that analogies help, I happen to be a big fan of books, and I happen to know that progression: illuminated manuscripts (which I absolutely adored when I was a child), the Gutenberg story, the Aldus story (he was one of my great heroes, because he was the guy who decided he had to read more than one book), then Martin Luther. Those immediately sprang to mind as soon as I had decided that the computer wasn't a car anymore.

Then the thing becomes the two most powerful things that you have to do right away. You don't have to wait to gradually figure them out. You have to get the thing small. And you have to find a language that will bring what it is closer to the people, rather than the other way around.

Yeah, I thought up the Dynabook in 1968 and made a cardboard model of it, and a couple of years later I was about to go to Carnegie Mellon University to do the thing. I had been consulting a little bit for the newly-formed Xerox PARC, and it just got to be too much fun, so I never wound up going to Pittsburgh.

Xerox PARC was an attempt by Xerox to spend part of its research and development money on really far-out stuff that was not going to be particularly controlled by them. In the late '60s they bought themselves a computer company, they bought a whole bunch of publishers. They were trying to get into a larger sphere than just office copiers. One of the ringing phrases of the late '60s was "Xerox should be the architects of information." They had this expansive feeling about getting into other areas.

They got Jack Goldman in, who was a scientist at Ford. As the chief new chief scientist at Xerox, Jack realized that what we actually had to have at Xerox was something like a long range research center. Xerox was a big company even then, and what Jack decided to do was to hire George Pake who was the chancellor of Washington University in St. Louis. George was quite familiar with ARPA, and he hired Bob Taylor, who had been one of the funders of ARPA in the '60s. Taylor was one of the champions of Engelbart, one of the champions of the work at RAND, and so forth.

What Taylor did was, instead of hiring random good scientists, he decided to set up a miniature concentrated ARPA community. So he went out after all of the people he thought were the best in the ARPA research community. Those people were somewhat interested because the Mansfield Amendment was shutting down and constricting the kinds of far-out things that ARPA could do.

The Mansfield Amendment was an overreaction to the Vietnam War. A lot of people were worried about various kinds of government and especially military funding on campus. Secret funding, and all of this stuff. The ARPA information processing techniques projects got swept up in this, even though every single one of them was public domain and had already been spun off into dozens of companies, including DEC.

This was just one of these broad brush things done by Congress that happened to kill off one of the best things that's ever been set up in this country. And so a lot of smart people in universities, who believed more or less the same dream about the destiny of computers, were gathered up by Taylor. I was one of those.

I thought the people that were there were among the very best. By 1976, which was about six years after the place was started, there were 58 out of my personal pick of the top 100 in the world. They were divided into a couple of labs. People who had very strong opinions, who normally would not work with each other at all in any normal situation, were welded together by having known each other in the past, having come up through the ARPA community, believing more or less the same things.

Of course, when you have that kind of level of people, the disagreements in the tenth decimal place become significant. But it worked out very well, because we were able to get together completely on joint hardware projects. We built all of our own hardware as well as all of our own software there. The hardware was shared amongst the many different kinds of groups that were there. There was one set of hardware as we moved on from year to year, and then many different kinds of software design.

Well, the the psychology of that kind of person would be thought as being arrogant in most situations. We didn't know exactly what we were going to do, but we were quite sure that nobody else could do it better, whatever it was.

The architecture of information, that was a phrase that sounded good, it didn't actually mean anything. There was some mumbling that if paper goes away in the office in the next 25 years, Xerox should be the company to do it. Because that was their heartland business.

But Taylor was setting the place up to realize the ARPA dream. Which was to do man-computer symbiosis in all of the different directions that ARPA had been interested in the past. It included interactive computing, it included artificial intelligence and the notion of agents.

So there were projects that ranged from intensely practical, like Gary Starkweather doing the first laser printer, Metcalf and other people doing the Ethernet (the first packet switching local area net), Thacker being the main designer of the Alto (the first workstation and the first computer to look like the Macintosh).

I was head of the group that was interested in the Dynabook design. A lot of the things that we came up with for the Dynabook were simulated on the Alto, and became part of the first notion of what workstations and personal computers should be like. And those included things like icons and multiple overlapping windows and the whole paraphernalia that you see on machines like the Macintosh today.

One of the things we were incredibly interested in was how powerful it had to be. We didn't know how powerful it had to be, but it had to be able to do something like 90 or 95 percent of the things that you would generally like to do before you wanted to go to something more. Of course, we didn't know what that meant. We thought it would be somewhere around ten MIPS (million instructions per second), that was sort of the rule of thumb.

The machine we built was effectively somewhere between one and three MIPS, depending on how you measured it. And so it was less powerful than we thought. On the other hand it was about 50 times as powerful as a time-sharing terminal. So the magnification of what we could aspire to was enormous.

The machine was not done blindly. It was done after about a year of studying things like fonts, and what happens when the eye looks at little dots on screens, and what animation means. We did a bunch of real time music, very early synthesis, and so we knew a lot about what the machine should be and how fast it should run.

Yeah, a lot of us did. I was one of the drivers on one of these small machines. There were other groups at this time in 1971, when PARC was forming, who were building a large time-sharing system, to act as an institutional resource for PARC. There were lots of different things going on.

I wanted to do stuff with children because my feeling after doing the FLEX machine was that we, and I especially, were not very good at designing systems for adults. And then I thought, well, children have to use this thing, why don't we forget about adults for a while, we'll just design a tool for children, a medium for children, and we'll see what happens.

So I desperately wanted to get a bunch of these systems. I needed like fifteen of them. I needed to have them in a school somehow, with children, because I wanted to see how children reacted to these things, and improve the design that way.

The shock when you go out to real users of any kind is enormous. Because technical people live in this tiny little world. We like to think it's a big world, but it's actually a tiny little world. It's full of phrases that we learned when we were taking math classes, and it's hermetic. And it's full of people who like to learn complicated things. They delight in it.

One of the hardest things is for these kind of people to do any kind of user interface for people who are not like that at all. That is the number one dictum of user interface design: the users are not like us.

And so what you need to have is some way of constantly shocking yourself into realizing that the users are not like us. And children do it really well, because they don't care about the same kinds of things that adults do. They're not like this, they're not like that. They can always go out and play ball. They haven't learned to feel guilty about not working yet.

And the last thing you want to do is subject the children to more school. You don't want to put them through a training course to learn a computing system. So we use the term "forcing function". In many ways, it's harder to design a system for children than it is for adults, along a couple of couple of avenues. It forced us to start thinking about how human mentalities might work.

These eventually became the Smalltalk kids. The lead-in to that was that Seymour Papert had gotten a lot of good ideas from having worked with Piaget. Piaget had a notion of the evolution of mentality in early childhood as being sort of like a caterpillar into a butterfly.

The most important idea of it was that, at each stage of development, the kid was not a deficient adult. It was a fully functioning organism. It just didn't think about the world quite the same way as adults did. Other psychologists like Jerome Bruner had similar ideas, also inspired by by Piaget.

If you break them down into just three stages, one is where a lot of thinking is done just by grabbing. A hole is to dig it, an object is to grab it.

The next stage is very visual, in which many of the judgments that you make about the world are dominated by the way things look. In this stage, you have the Piaget water-pouring experiment: you pour from a squat glass into a tall thin one, and the kid in this stage says there's more water in the tall thin one. He doesn't have an underlying notion, a symbolic notion, that quantities are conserved. He doesn't have what Piaget calls "conservation." Conservation is not a visual idea. Visual is what does it look like when you compare.

Later on you get a stage that Piaget called the "symbolic stage", where facts and logic start to dominate the ways of thinking. A child in that stage knows as a fact that water doesn't appear and disappear. Nor does anything else. And so it's able to give you judgments or inferences based on these facts rather than by the way things appear.

Now, Bruner did a lot of these experiences over again, and added some sort of side trips into them. One of the things he did in the water-pouring experiment was to intersperse a cardboard after the child had said there's more water in the tall thin glass, and the kid immediately changed what he had just said, He said, "Oh no, there can't be more because where would it come from." And Bruner took the card away, and the kid changed back. He said, "No, look, there is more." Bruner put the card back and the kid said, "No, no there can't be more, where would it come from?" If you have any six year olds you'd like to torment, this is a pretty good way of doing it.

The way Bruner interpreted this is that we actually have separate ways of knowing about the world. One of them is kinesthetic, one of them is visual, one of them is symbolic. Of course, we have other ways as well. And these ways are in parallel. They really constitute separate mentalities. Because of their evolutionary history, they are both rather distinct in the way that they deal with the world, and they are not terribly well integrated with each other.

So, you can get some remarkable results by telling people an English sentence, which they'll accept, and then showing them the picture that represents the same thing and have an enormous emotional reaction.

Well, we were clutching at straws. You'll do anything when you don't know what to do. But since we were going to be dealing with humans, it seemed like a reasonable thing to try and get something out of the newly-formed cognitive psychology.

The Piaget stuff didn't help me much. Because one of the ways of interpreting it is that, for example, you probably shouldn't teach first graders arithmetic because they aren't quite set up to receive it yet. You'd be better off teaching them something that's more kinesthetic, like geometry or topology. Tying their shoes and stuff. There are a whole bunch of things you can do with knots and things that are higher mathematics. But the particular symbolic manipulations of arithmetic are not easy for them at that stage. Well, that's important when you're designing curriculum in schools, but it didn't tell us much about a user interface.

The Bruner thing though was really exciting. Because one of the ways of interpreting it is that, at every age in a person's life, there are these multiple mentalities there. When the kid is six years old, the symbolic one may not be functioning very much, but there are tricks you can use to get it to function. Bruner had this notion that you could take an idea that's normally only taught symbolically, like some physical principle, and teach it to a six year-old kinesthetically, and to a ten year-old visually. And later on, to a fifteen year-old, you can teach it symbolically. This notion of a spiral. And Papert had the same idea.

If you want to learn how a gyroscope works, the last thing you want to do is look at the equation. What you want is to do a little bit of visual reasoning about the thing, and then have one in your hand in the form of a big bicycle wheel. When you turn that bicycle wheel and feel what it does, it clicks together with the small amount of reasoning you are doing and all of a sudden you understand why it it has to flop the other way. There's nothing that mysterious about it. But from the outside, looking at the equation, thinking about cross products and stuff like that, it just doesn't make any sense.

So, Bruner's idea was when you don't know what else to do in developing a curriculum, you try recapitulating the Piagetian stages. Cast this adult level knowledge down into a kinesthetic form, and recast it later on into a visual form. Teach it over and over again. He thought of the these lower mentalities, kinesthetically and iconic mentalities, as being what we call intuition. They can't talk much, but they have their own figurative ways of knowing about the world that supply a nice warm way of thinking about physical problems.

Yes, but not a good one. The mouse is okay. But if you only use it to point on the screen, it's not very kinesthetic. Because the major operation in kinesthesia is grabbing something and moving it. Engelbart did not have that.

Of course, people had been moving things around in in computer graphics, and most people that had ever done this liked it better. The first little paper I wrote about the Dynabook talked about moving things around. GRAIL moved things around. Sketchpad moves things around. It's a natural thing when you're thinking about things from a graphics center, which Engelbart wasn't. Even though he had little bit of graphics, he was thinking about it from text. Thinking about things from a graphics center, it's natural to want to just move something around.

And so the connection with what had already been done with what Bruner was saying got us thinking a little bit more strongly about what the mouse was supposed to be about. The mouse was not just for indicating things on the screen. It was to give you a kinesthetic entry into this world.

I don't know how all scientific discoveries are made. They usually are connected together with little flashes of insight over long periods of time. But in fact, when I started off I was quite sure that Bruner had the key. We got the ingredients rather early for doing the user interface.

But it was remarkable to me how many people we had to try ideas out on, for years. Three or four years we had to, not only build the system, but in fact the early versions of the system were not as good as later versions of the system. It actually took about five years, and dealing with hundreds of people, to come out with the first thing that sort of looked like the Mac.

Yeah, the desktop was actually an idea we didn't like particularly. That was something that was developed when Xerox was thinking specifically of going at offices.

When you have a Dynabook, and you have simulations and multidimensional things as your major way of storing knowledge, the last thing you want to do is print any of it out. Because you are destroying the multidimensionality, and you can't run them. So one of the rules is, if you have anything interesting in your computer, you don't want to print it. And if your computer is always with you, you won't print it. When you give it to somebody else, what you're sending to them is something that was in your Dynabook to their Dynabook.

The user interface that we worked on was very much aimed at that. It had a different notion than the desktop. The desktop was sort of a smaller version of it. What we had, you can think of it as multiple desks if you want, but we had this notion that people wanted to work on projects. I especially liked to work on multiple projects. People used to accuse me of abandoning my desk. It got piled up and I'd go to another one and pile it up. When I'm working on multiple things I like to have a table full of all the crap that goes there, and another table, and so forth. Everything is in the state it was when I last left it.

That was the user interface that we wound up doing, where you could move from one project to another project. If you did it on the Macintosh, you could think of it as having multiple Macintosh desks, each one of which had all the tools for that particular project.

Another part of my background, before I was heavily into computer science, was theater. If you think about it, theater is kind of an absurd setup. You have perhaps a balding person in his forties impersonating a teenager in triumph, holding a skull in front of cardboard scenery, right? It can't possibly work. But in fact it does all the time. And the reason it does is that theater, the theatrical experience, is a mirror that blasts the audience's intelligence back out at them. As somebody once said, "People don't come to the theater to forget. They come tingling to remember." What it is, is an evoker.

Again, having the thing go from an automobile to a medium started me thinking about user interface as a theatrical notion. What you do in the theater is to take something that is impossibly complex, like human existence, and present it in something that is more like stereotypes, which the user can then resynthesize human existence out of.

I think it was Picasso who said that art is not the truth, art is a lie that tells the truth. So I started thinking about the user interface as something that was a lie — namely, it really isn't what's going on inside the computer — but it nonetheless tells the truth because it's a different kind of computer. It evokes what the computer can do in the user's mind, and that's what you're trying to do. So that's the computer they wind up getting. That's what I think of as leverage.

Yes. In fact, we used the term "user illusion." I don't think we ever used the term "user interface," or at least certainly not in the early days. And we did not use the term "metaphor," like as in "desktop metaphor." That was something that came along later.

The idea was, what can you do theatrically that will cover the amount of magic that you want the person to be able to experience. In the theater, you don't have to present the world as physicists see it, but if you're going to have magic in Act III, you'd better foreshadow it in Act I. There's this whole notion of, how do you dress the set in order to set up expectations that will later turn out to be true in the audience's mind.

They were building various machines. It's kind of funny, because the way it worked out is, I took Wes Clark's LINC design and came up with sort of a modern version in a little handheld, sort of like a suitcase, that I called MiniCOM. I had done some design of it, how things would run on it, and the problem was it wasn't powerful enough. But it was something I figured I could get 15 or 20 of, for the experiments that we wanted. I had designed the first version of Smalltalk for this machine.

Much to my amazement, I got turned down flat by a nameless Xerox executive. I was crushed. "No, we're doing time-sharing." I was only 31 years old, and it was just terrible.

So then I evolved another scheme of getting a bunch of little minicomputers, like Data General Novas. I could only afford five of those. I had something like $230,000 or so. I'll take the system we were experimenting with fonts and bitmap displays on, and I'll replicate that, I'll get five of them. It's an incredibly expensive way to do it, but that would give me five machines to do stuff.

And then this Xerox executive went away on a "task force," and Chuck Thacker and Butler Lampson came over to me in September of 1972 and said to me, "Have you got any money?" And I said, "Well, I've got about $230,000." And they said, "Well, how would you like us to build you your machine?" And I said, "I'd like it fine."

What I gave them was the results of the experiments I had done in fonts and bitmap graphics, plus we had done some prototyping of animations and music. To do all these things that had to be so-and-so fast. What happened there was a combination of my interest in a very small machine and Butler Lampson's interest in a $500 PDP-10 someday. And Chuck Thacker wanted to build a machine 10 times as fast as a Data General Nova.

Chuck was the hardware genius, so he got to decide what it was in the end. He went off and in three and a half months with two technicians completely built the first machine that had the bitmap display. He built it not as small as I wanted it, but ten times faster than I had planned. It was a larger capacity machine. It was simultaneously both the first thing that was like a Mac, and the first workstation.

An absolute triumph. Yeah, this was the Alto.

That was fairly controversial, because bits were expensive back then. Before about 1971, bits were intolerably expensive, because in memory, they're in the form of these little magnetic cores. Even a modest memory was many cubic feet, and required expensive read sensors, amplifiers, and power supply — it was a mess.

In the early '70s, Intel came out with a chip called the 1103 that had a thousand bits on it. The chips you buy today have like 4 million bits, and the Japanese are making ones with 16 million and 64 million bits. This was a thousand bits on a chip. This is the best thing that ever happened, because all of a sudden, everything changed. This is one of these predictions of Bob Noyce and Gordon Moore, that it completely changed the relationship of us to computing hardware.

The people who wanted to build a big time-sharing machine at PARC, including Chuck Thacker and Butler Lampson, immediately started building one out of this memory. It was also the right kind of thing to build the Alto out of. But we still couldn't have a lot of it. This was 1972 that we're talking about.

The bitmap display is something that we didn't invent. People had talked about it, there even were small versions of it. Television is something that is discrete in one dimension and analog in another dimension, but you can think of it as being 300,000 separate pixels on a screen. It's something everybody would like, because it's perfectly general. The nicest thing about television is that you don't have to determine beforehand what kind of picture you're going to show on it. You can show anything, you don't have to worry. Whereas every other kind of display, you had to have some notion about what you were going to display in order to know how much power you should build into the display.

We spent a year and a half or so trying different kinds of displays and making calculations, and at some point we realized, oh, the heck with it, we just have to go for a bitmap display. Of course, we didn't know that people would settle for tiny little displays like this, so the first display on the Alto actually was about two and a half times the size of the first Mac. It was about 500,000 pixels. It was an 8.5 x 11 page display, the exact size that the Dynabook was supposed to be.

I invented the first painting program in the summer of 1972, and it was programmed up by Steve Purcell who was one of our students. Again, the idea was to get away from having just crisp computer graphics, as they had been in the past. The problem was that people don't design on computers, and one of the reasons they don't design on computers is they can't make things messy enough. My friend Nicholas Negroponte at MIT was also thinking similar thoughts. He wanted people to be able to sketch as well as to render.

So I invented the painting program. The painting program was a direct result of thinking seriously about bitmap displays. It's maybe the first thing you think of. Because you are always painting on it when you're putting up characters, you're painting characters. It was very much like MacPaint, it turned out to be many years later. I have a nice video showing it being used.

The second thing I thought up was that having a bitmap display, combined with multiple windows like the FLEX machine had, would automatically allow us to do this overlapping idea, which we all thought was terribly important. We thought this 8.5 x 11 display was impossibly small for all the stuff we wanted to put on it, and the overlapping windows would give you a way of having much more effective screen space as you move things around.

The first thing is the Macintosh represents an amount of work, even to get the first Mac out, equivalent to what we did at Xerox added on to it. The screen design in the Macintosh is unique to the Macintosh and much nicer than we used. There all of these extra things on it. And of course, the number of tools you can buy — there's something like 9,000 pieces of software rendered in the Macintosh user interface that you can buy for it. So the scope is enormous.

But in terms of the categories, it's about the same. We had both painting with bitmaps and crisp computer graphics. We did the first desktop publishing, the first WYSIWYG editors. Most of the paraphernalia that people work with, with one exception, were part of the original concept of the software that went on the Alto. And that exception was spreadsheets.

I, for one, oscillated. I thought of the Alto as just an intermediate stage. I wanted the Dynabook. I thought of that user interface as a stopgap measure for the real thing. See, I was basically interested not in the access literacy part, which the user interface represents, but in — [INTERRUPTION]

Well, one of the things that we realized early in the game with Xerox and its executives was that we were going to have to do a lot of demonstrations. We originally started out trying to talk to them, and we wrote a bunch of papers called the Pendery Papers that expressed what we were trying to do, and those did not get received into any worthwhile corners of their minds. So we thought that we would have to do demonstrations. We were set up to do demonstrations, we did lots of demonstrations.

Also, we didn't want to be cut off from the research community that we had come from. So we wanted to be able to give demos. And the experience with Xerox went from the lab being fairly open, to periods of paranoia where the lab was completely closed to visitors. We used to say to Xerox, look, we're years ahead of everybody else, and lead time is everything in this business. You just carry through on this stuff. Don't worry, you can show everybody in the world this stuff, it doesn't matter, they won't be able to build it in time.

It's still true. If you look at the Macintosh, which came out years later, look how long it's taken IBM to not quite get there yet. They're still pushing that idea. Windows 3.0 has just come out. This stuff takes years to do. If you have a few years lead time on anybody and your people are capable, you can sustain it.

Well, I don't know about that, because it's really hard to predict that kind of future. I was amazed at the number of people, for instance, who bought IBM PCs, considering how useless I thought they were. The interest of everybody in switching over to the overlapping window interface with icons and mouse, I think, shows that what people bought millions of is not what they want. They want what we wanted early in the '70s. But I think predicting what people will do under conditions of expediency is impossible.

Yeah. Well, we actually set up a production line for the things. I needed quite a few, and they started getting popular, so we set up a production line. I believe that upwards of 2,000 of them were built in the decade of the '70s. Certainly by 1975 or '76, almost everybody at PARC including the secretaries had Altos. They were connected together by ethernet, and there were page-a-second laser printers nearby that you could go. It was a very similar model to the offices that you see today.

When Xerox made its fateful turndown in 1976, there were at least 500 machines operating the way machines do in the 1980s. They were not turning down a paper idea or a single prototype. They were turning down something that had been functioning for three years.

Well, the story is complicated. It has to do with a bunch of things. I think the simplest way of characterizing what happened is that, just as when IBM in the '50s turned down their chance at the Xerox machine (because they ultimately thought they were in the computer business rather than the communications business), Xerox, when push came to shove, thought they were a copier company. The problem with railroads is they tried to make faster locomotives rather than investing in the airlines. So there was that problem.

There was a problem of slightly more cost in doing the Alto versus a word processor that they wanted to do. All these things contributed. I think one of the main problems is that the executive who made the final decision had no way of personally evaluating what he was being told from different sides. So, it was complicated.

In 1976, when they had to make the decision — under the best conditions it would take a couple of years to get a machine out — they would've had to charge around $20,000 or so for it. Which is not bad, that early. That's what word processors were selling for. But it was right on the edge.

And by the time the Star came out, which was too little too late, it was I guess a $20,000 machine that should've been sold for around $10,000. The Lisa had some of the same problem. It was a $10,000 machine that should've sold for a couple of thousand.

I sort of feel it would be a little bit presumptuous to declare it a golden age in computing. It was certainly a golden age for me. I think the five years between '71 and '76 were the most fun I've ever had doing research.

I think that there've been five or six critical places in computing over the last forty years that have affected the way people think about things, and PARC was one of them.

Oh, yes. That was that was a hilarious little side excursion. Stewart Brand was the person who put the Whole Earth Catalog together. He got interested in computer people because he lived right across the street from Engelbart's work at SRI. So he decided he'd do a piece about the culture. One of the places that was just starting up in 1971 and '72 was Xerox PARC.

We all knew him, he was a friend, and we invited him in. He wrote this great article which was published in Rolling Stone, which was really considered to be a rag back then, especially by the East Coast establishment.

Yes, the whole culture. And we were photographed, the photographs were all taken by Annie Leibowitz. It was a very Hollywood, California-type scene, and the Xerox people did not like it at all. They had an enormous reaction, so large a reaction to it that when Stewart republished the article in his book, they forced him to not use the name Xerox. So he referred constantly in this article to "Shy Corporation" which is what he called it.

Yes, that was rather late in the game, though. That was quite a few years after the Alto had been around. But there were constantly recirclings. This wasn't so much trying to get the Alto out as a product, although there were people who were very interested in it. A lot of these meetings, particularly the Boca Raton one, had to do with just getting Xerox at the top and its major executives to have some sense of how the world was changing and what their future was likely to be.

No, I don't think they got it. But I think the important thing about the Xerox deal is what they did promise to do was to give us relatively unsupervised support for a period of ten years. And that is what they did.

We had our skirmishes with them, and there were some people who had to sacrifice their body and soul to keep the umbrella over the group. But in fact, Xerox turned out to be a very good funder. There was no promise or even any intent that I ever heard in the beginning that Xerox was going to turn these into products. Most large corporations use their long range research more as a hedge against future disaster than as pure product development.

I was surprised. It's one thing for them not to make any representations about doing it as a product, but the whole setup was so obviously the way it was going to be that I was surprised, sure. I was amazed.

A 4-bit wide chip, and then a 8-bit chip, and so forth — it was sort of inevitable that they would appear. For me, I was surprised that so many people were interested in them. I realized that an enormous number of people felt disenfranchised from computers completely, and these were a way of getting in. You could touch the new technology. But the kinds of software you could run on them was really limited.

There were various opinions at PARC. Larry Tesler was much more interested in the 8-bit machines than I was, as an example. My feeling was is that you had to have at least a 16-bit machine that went so-and-so fast in order to do all of this stuff. And in fact, that's exactly the way it worked out. The Macintosh was a 16-bit machine that went thus-and-so fast, and you had to go that fast in order to do all the things that we were doing at PARC.

From my standpoint, I would have just been just as happy if no machines had been built up until 1984 or so. Just from the standpoint of, you think of all of the unfortunate standards that were set, like MS-DOS and so forth, that are holding back the world even today. I think it would have been... but you never know.

Certainly one great thing was done on an 8-bit micro, and that was VisiCalc. That was one of the best things that's ever been done on a personal computer, as an idea. The reaction to that at PARC was both admiration and shock. We couldn't believe that we hadn't seen it. That's how arrogant we were.

But I think that, aside from that, almost everything else done on the 8-bit micros was a sort of a reversion back to the early '60s, when machines were very weak. Most of the 8-bit micros had either no operating system or terrible operating systems. It's not clear which is worse. And many of those operating systems are still hanging around today.

I actually thought that Xerox was the right place to launch from, since it wasn't in the computer business. It really didn't have any history to give up there. Whereas, I think it was more remarkable for a company that was deeply wedded to a certain kind of 8-bit computing, like Apple was, to be willing to throw it all out and start in a completely new way. But that is very much one of Steve Jobs' biggest strengths.

No. I was at the the famous demo that Larry Tesler gave Steve Jobs and some of the other people from Apple, but...

No, Xerox had a stake in Apple by then. There's a company called Xerox Development Corporation, and they had stakes in various companies. I forget how much it was, 10 or 20 percent or something like that. At PARC, we thought the Apple was the better of the 8-bit micros that were around.

But we gave many, many demos. So it was not unusual to have somebody like Steve Jobs and other people come over.

Sure.

He got it right away. There are two kinds of demos. There are ones where you are struggling to get the person to see what's going on. We found, for many people, they weren't used to looking at a computer screen, so we had to put our finger on the screen and get them to watch our finger, and then see if they could focus in another quarter of an inch.

Then there are other people who tell you what is going to happen next. They are so on top of the demo that they know. "And now you're going to show me..." Yes, here it is. Those are great demos.

I had the great pleasure of showing Smalltalk to Kristen Nygaard who is the inventor of Simula, which is one of the major influences on Smalltalk. It was that kind of demo, he just knew everything I was going to show him. It was stuff that he had been dreaming about for years, and here it was. We've been friends ever since.

Well, what he took back was an idea that things could be done a different way. Particularly, Steve is such a visual person, very sensitive to how things look and appear. The whole notion of the graphics interface was something that really captured his imagination. And eventually some people from PARC went over to Apple. Larry Tesler was one of them.

But what happened there was that they pretty much took what we had done as a departure point, and did a completely new design. I didn't see any of it until the Lisa came out in 1983. And when I saw it, I thought it was just the best thing I had ever seen. The Lisa was beautiful.

Yeah, and the Macintosh in many ways is not as good a design as the Lisa, but it was a severe compromise. The thing that was great about it is that it used the weak power of the 16-bit 68000 to great advantage, whereas the Lisa couldn't quite make it with all the things it was trying to do. So in many ways, you can think of the Macintosh II as Apple's return to the Lisa.

Well, I don't think any of us at PARC were fighting a war, so it wasn't clear who we were victorious against. But if it meant getting lots of people convinced, I don't think that it was won, because the majority of people who compute today still don't interact with a computer in that way.

I think the important thing is that what we did at PARC was not an ultimate answer to the problem of interacting with computers. I think that a lot of people are going to be interested in it more than the millions that are now, and what will inevitably happen is that people will continue to be interested in it long after it's worthwhile to interact with computers in that way.

People have this tendency, once they like something, to get religious about it. It hangs on and hangs on, long beyond it's actual use.

I don't think we ultimately know what the reasons are, but we certainly were guided by some theories that we have different ways of knowing about the world, and only one of them is through language. We have a kinesthetic way of knowing about the world through touch. We have a visual way of knowing about the world. The kinesthetic and visual ways seem to be more intuitive for people. They're less crisp. They deal more with analogy. The touch thing makes you feel at home. You're not isolated from things when you're in contact with them, you're grounded.

For me, the major reason the Macintosh works is because the mouse gives you just the tiniest way of putting your hand in through the screen, to touch the objects that you're working on. The screen gives you a theatrical representation of something much more complex, something that computer designers don't even want to think about, a computer executing two million instructions per second, with thousands and thousands of instructions in there. Finally, the least successful thing that we did, that we're still working on, is a symbolic underpinning for all of this that allows you to express back into this little pocket universe.

Yes, I think so. That film of the little girl, 22 months old, using a Mac very confidently — she'd already been using it for about six months or so — strikes a lot of people in a way that words don't. Because they see here's this little child, about 70 percent literate in the "access" part of the Macintosh user interface. She can start up applications, and do things in them, save them away, and all of those things.

That's what we were trying to do, to extend this thing from being something like a specialized tool, or a car, to something that is more like media, that extends down into childhood and up through the elderly.

That's true, although the notion of the stored program goes back a long way. But for me, there isn't any real difference. Hardware is just software that's crystalized early. Basically, what you always have is something that you can remember in terms of, some medium that can take on markings. And there are different kinds of markings. Then you have to have something that allows you to read and change those markings.

The simplest kind of computer you can build is one that only has a couple of states in it, and it's all memory. It's practically a clock. Everything is out on the memory. There's almost no hardware there at all.

The main reason there's a fair amount of bits in the hardware of today's computers is there are a lot of functions you would like to compute rapidly. So there are special purpose little pieces of logic in there for doing fast arithmetic and so forth.

To do arithmetic and stuff. I think it definitely is true. There have been computer designs, and computers built, that look at their memory in a completely different way. Doing content-addressed storage, and having many thousands of processors looking at storage at the same time, where hardly anything resembling arithmetic is done most of the time.

But in fact, it doesn't matter, because arithmetic itself is just a manifestation of a particular way of putting the logic elements together.

Right. And there's a trade-off between the number of different kinds of markings that you want to have the memory store, and the amount of logic that you need to be able to carry out computing functions.

Sometimes. These days, they're usually up in the range of 300 or so. If you're trying to understand how a computer works down inside, it's actually mostly memory, a vast amount of very undifferentiated stuff that is just for holding markings. Then there's a very small amount of logic that carries out a few basic instructions. You can think of all of the rest of the hundreds of instructions as things that the basic instructions could carry out, but have been encoded especially for speed.

Good programmers are relatively lazy, so the last thing they want to do is spend a lot of time grubbing around down in the machine code of the computer. So, usually what they do is write a couple of pieces of software — one is called an operating system, another one is called the programming language. Often they are both the same, as Smalltalk was.

That piece of software creates a virtual machine which is much more hospitable. It's a machine simulating a much nicer machine, and all of a sudden, life is much more fun. Often you will use that machine to simulate an even nicer machine.

Eventually things slow down, so the most wonderful machine might run too slowly to be interesting. But some people still like to program in terms of these highly idealized machines, because maybe they'll be built one of these days.

Yes, in fact, you can think of the user interface as the last layer that is designed to further sweeten the realities of all these different layerings that are going on. When you're baking a cake in the kitchen, you don't have to worry about the details of organic chemistry, because they're already subsumed by the ingredients that you have, and the recipes are there to make sure that what you have converges on a cake rather than a mess.

For exactly the same reason, people like to confine where they're working into an area where they know roughly what is going to happen. If that area doesn't work out well, then they'll go to a deeper lever and make a few changes.

Right, simulation would not be that much fun if it were really slow. When people had to calculate trajectories of shells in World War II, they'd have 300 or 400 people on desk calculators just calculating a simple ballistic trajectory. That was a simulation, and in wartime was deemed important enough to put these 400 people to work for days doing these things.

I think it's one of the niftiest things to wrap your head around. Regardless of what kind of thing you have, if it has a few basic properties — a memory, the ability to put symbols into memory and take them out, to make changes and make a few tests on them — that is enough machinery to enable you to simulate any computer that has ever existed, or any computer that will ever exist.

How interesting the result will be depends on fast the simulation runs. People sometimes think that a little machine on a desk or even a Sharp Wizard calculator is a different kind of thing than a big Cray computer. But in fact, they are the same kind of thing. You could calculate one of the greatest pieces of 3D graphics on a Sharp Wizard, given enough centuries to do it and enough external memory to put parts of the calculation.

The first person who seemed to realize it was Ada Augusta, who was the sidekick of Babbage and maybe history's first programmer. She wrote in one of her papers that "the analytic engine weaves algebraic patterns just as the Jacquard loom weaves patterns in silk."

She understood that the generality of representation was the same kind as you can represent in books, namely, the kinds of things that we can talk about. It wasn't restricted to just numeric calculations, but extended into the realm of general symbolisation of models.

I think two things happened. The Turing thing was there, and most of the early computer people either were mathematicians or had a lot of math in their background. There were other formulations like that of Turing. Gödel's theorem was also a way of building a universal machine. Post production systems are similar. They're all studying mathematical problems, but they translated well to computer machinery. And most computer people were aware of them.

The second thing that had to happen was that there had to be some way of believing that the computer could get big enough and fast enough, so that anything that Turing said made any practical sense. You have to have both of those things. What's happened is that very early on, even in the '60s but especially in the '70s, people regularly would build very simple computers, and then use those simple computers that ran very quickly to simulate the kind of hardware they really wanted.

That's what we did at Xerox PARC. Chuck Thacker, who did the Alto, built a machine with almost no logic for that period of time. It was 1972, and it had about 160 chips, two boards worth of chips. That was very, very few gates. But it ran extremely fast. It ran about five times faster than its main memory.

Because of that, the Alto could be many different machines. It was a Smalltalk machine when we ran Smalltalk on it. It was a Mesa machine when they ran Mesa on it. It could take on different personalities. I've always thought that was a really good way to go. Until you actually know the biblical truth on what your computer architecture should be, why not have a computer that you can mold into the kind of virtual machine that you want, right at the lowest level.

I agree on the romantic part, but of course, I'm fairly romantic about musical instruments. Most musicians are. Most musicians adore their instruments.

From my standpoint, my romance is very much connected to the same way I think about other marvelous contraptions that we've made, including musical instruments, but also sail planes, the kind of marvelous inventions that Paul McCready makes, and so forth.

No.

With a musical instrument, you can build a private universe for somebody else. But it doesn't have the tangibility that that the computer has.

On the other hand, it's worthwhile remembering that no matter what we build on the computer and no matter what appears on the screen, it doesn't have any particular sense to it unless some human is there comprehending it. So, it does have something in common with building a beautiful piece of music. Ultimately, there is a listener. It might be just the composer. But what comes out, has to, in some way, come back into the human sensorium and be understood.

I think I got talked into that by some magazine. One of the traditional ways of programming on a computer is to think of the memory part of it as being inert, like ingredients in a kitchen. And to think of the programs that you write as being like the recipes, and the central processor is kind of like the cook who's looking at the recipe book and then goes over and stirs the ingredients. If you're lucky, you wind up with something good to eat.

Another way of thinking is that it's like a puppet theatre. The puppets are all inert, and there are puppet masters going around. In the computer, it's a very energetic puppet master because there's just one, generally, which goes around twitching all of the strings of all of the puppets fast enough so that it seems like something real is going on.

But another way of looking at programming is to say, well, why not let the puppets pull their own strings? We'll let each puppet have, in effect, its own little computer within this larger computer. We'll let them be much more self contained. There won't be puppet masters from the outside. That's called object-oriented programming. The benefits of it are simplicity and ease of writing the programs.

There's a continuum from totally lock-step proceduralism, to trying to deal with multiple processes, to having objects which have many of their processes inside of them and act much less sequential, to what's coming in the future which is something called agent-oriented programming or modular control programming — it hasn't got a good name yet. But something where the elements are much more like biological cells, they're quite self contained. They may spend 90 percent of their energies just maintaining their own equilibrium, and maybe only 10 percent of them contributes to the larger system as a whole.

Yes, that's a very good way of thinking about them.

The computer is only working at one level. Any given computer, it's always executing two million instructions per second. So you can't make it work harder.

But it's like, if you have a 5 horsepower go-cart and you put it up various grades of hills, there will be a hill eventually that it won't be able to climb. It's always putting out 5 horsepower, and it needs 10 to get up that particular hill. And that's what happens, things start slowing down as you put more and more burden on an old-style processor.

Well, you can figure it out, because the typical Mac these days executes about two million instructions per second. Opening a file has to go out to the disk, so it's complicated because now it depends on the speed of the disk moving stuff back and forth.

But suppose you're just in the Multi-Finder, you're in this window doing something, and you put the mouse in another window and the window comes up to the top of the screen. You just get out a stopwatch. If it's a big, lumbering thing and it takes about a second to rebuild the screen, then two million instructions have been executed. If it takes two seconds, then four million instructions have been executed. It's always executing that many instructions per second even when it's just idling.

And often the complexity is something that is a by-product of the way the system was programmed, rather than being intrinsic.

You need some sort of perspective to think about tools and agents. I think about them in terms of the way we've extended ourselves over the last several hundred thousand years. When you say extension to somebody, they almost always come back and say "tools." Indeed, there have been levers and wheels and physical tools. But there have also been mental tools like language and mathematics.

I think of tools as being extensions of the gesture, a way of manipulating things. You're manipulating symbols when you're dealing with language. You're bringing things that are hard to deal with into your power, via your hand or something like your hand. The M-word for tools, to me, is "manipulation." Tools are things that you watch while you manipulate them.

The other main way people have extended themselves is by getting other people to take on their goals. Mumford called this "making mega-machines." He said that for most of human history, most machinery made by humans has had other humans as its moving parts. We make cities and cultures, and there are groups trying to do this and groups trying to do that. There are fewer goals in those kinds of groups than there are people. They've taken on each other's goals, traded off in one way or the other, and they are communicating.

The kind of entity that can take on your goals and act in your behalf, we call an agent. An agent is something that watches you, and you manage it. The M-word is "management" for agent, and "manipulation" for tools.

You could say that a shepherd dog, or maybe a horse, maybe a thermostat — you have to work fairly hard to build a thermostat, to get it to take on the goal of what temperature you want. But by and large, they've been people up to now.

The interesting thing about computers, when you're building agents on them, is the agents don't have to be as smart as people. Just like a thermostat does not have to be as smart as a person to be useful. The main thing you want it to do is to be able to take on some collection of goals, and to be able to deal with those goals while you're not around.

Yeah, if you like to use that term. You could call it "flexible competence," and make it sound a little less loaded.

One of the ways I think about looking ahead into the future is to try and find analogies that might actually make some sense, and also to look for driving forces. One of the driving forces for the PARC-type user interface came just from there being inexpensive integrated circuits around. You start getting a proliferation of computers that are inexpensive enough for people to buy, and all of a sudden the kinds of people who might want to use computers changes completely. So all of a sudden you need a much easier-to-use user interface. There is a driving force now to do something, because it isn't just graduate students any more.

To me, the driving force for agents is pervasive networking, because the techniques used on the Macintosh don't work well when you're connected up to a trillion objects scattered all over the world. You need something looking for potential objects that will further your own goals. And you need that something to be looking 24 hours a day.

We think that what we'll have is 10, 15, 20 or more little agents, many of them not particularly intelligent, but able to flexibly take on a goal that we have. An example of one is an agent that goes out and finds you the newspaper you'd most like to read at breakfast every morning. All night long it works. It can touch dozens of different news sources, the Associated Press, New York Times and so forth, looking for things that are relevant to you. It can go to other sources for getting photographs and so forth. It can do the news gathering with a particular interest in the kinds of things that you have been involved in. A headline could say, "New fighting in Afghanistan," or it might say, "Your 3 o'clock meeting was cancelled today," because news now could involve your own electronic mail. The sidebar might say, "Your children slept well last night."

This is an interesting example of an agent, because it's one that was built about ten years ago. It did not require a large amount of intelligence in order to work. Its major strength was its ability to work 24 hours a day while you weren't there. With a limited ability of doing matching against what you said you wanted and what it thought you wanted, it could do a great deal of useful work for you.

The way I think about that is these three very different ways of relating the human to the computer. One is the institutional way of the time-sharing mainframe. One is the desktop way where you control all the stuff. The third way is the intimate way, which is the Dynabook way, which is continuously connected into the worldwide informational network.

A Dynabook is sort of a figment of imagination. It was a Holy Grail that got us going. It was a cardboard model that allowed us to avoid having meetings about what we were trying to do. It was a lot of different things.

But it was basically a service concept, not a box concept. There were actually three physical renderings of the Dynabook we thought about. One was the notebook. One was something that went in your pocket that had a head-mounted display and glasses. I had worked with Ivan Sutherland's head-mounted display in the '60s. And one was Nicholas Negroponte's idea of the sensitive wristwatch that, in the 20 years future or so, when there is a network wherever there is an electric plug in the wall, then your user interface will follow you from room to room as as you go. Everything has become pervasive. You don't need to carry a big computer or even a tiny computer around with you.

The whole idea behind the Dynabook was the kinds of service, and your relationship to it, which should be intimate, casual, mundane. You should be able to aspire to the heights on it, just as you can when you learn English. You can aspire to the heights of Shakespeare, but you're not forced to do what Shakespeare did every time you use the language. This idea of having a nice, connected ramp without lots of bumps and so forth in it. As Seymour Papert likes to say, "low threshold, no ceiling."

It's several. One is that Apple traditionally has been a company very interested in the educational process and helping children in schools, so we do a lot of things in this school that have to do with thinking about how schooling might be in the future. Then, specifically, one of the things that we do is a project that's been going on for about four years now, to find ways that will allow children to be able to write in the computer as fluently as they can now read using the Macintosh user interface.

What we do, since artificial intelligence is coming along, we're trying to find ways to both understand artificial intelligence, and understand how to program it, by putting together a set of tools that allow children to do the kind of artificial intelligence programming normally only done by adults.

When you think of adults trying to simulate humans, humans are pretty tough, nobody has done a simulation yet. I've always felt it would be a good idea to work our way up through the food chain. Start off with fairly simple animals, and see how they interact with the world. That's something that children are interested in.

Quite a few years ago we got the idea that it would be really great if we could give children an environment where they could create ecologies to study animals and plants, build those models into the computer, and see if those models reflected what they thought they understood from the real world. So there's a constant comparison between the real world and the and the computer model.

The school has torn up part of its playground to make a life lab, which has both animals and plants in it. The classrooms have animal cages and aquariums and so forth. So, there's a lot of real animals to study. And then we also have Macintoshes with a new system we've designed called Playground, that tries to bring some of the techniques of artificial intelligence programming to 8, 9, and 10 year-olds right now.

Well... in one sense, I think so. In the sense that I've always wanted to close the loop at least with something that was like reading and something that was like writing. And right now, the something that's like reading is using the Macintosh user interface language to deal with 9,000 or 10,000 applications that are out there. That seems to work reasonably successfully right now.

The equivalent of writing should be something that allows children to aspire to the same kinds of things that are built on the Mac. They may not sit down and do Aldus PageMaker or something like that, because that's like a large play or something. But they should be able to see a continuity between what they're doing and these tools that adults make for them.

We want to do something like what Dewey was talking about in the last century. He pointed out that in most of the ages of mankind, the games that children played were serious simulations of what the adults did. The African child practicing with a spear, or the Eskimo child learning how to kill birds because he's eventually going to have to go and kill seals for food, is doing something that is content-rich relative to the adult world. But the 20th-century child dressed up in a nurse's suit and playing nursie with her doll has been cut off from the content part of that adult activity. Only the form is left. So the kids are very disenfranchised from most things that are happening to adults.

One of the things that was noticed right away with computers is that when you put a child on a computer, they know they're doing the real thing. They can see instinctively the continuity between it and the other things that are going. Actually, much better than adults do.

The story I always tell is: imagine the parents were afraid that their children wouldn't make it in life unless they were musicians. And the state legislature said, "Well, okay, we'll put a piano in every classroom. But we don't have enough money to hire musicians, so we'll give the existing teachers two-week refresher courses." Music wouldn't get into the classroom.

I think we have a very similar problem when we want to think of the technology as being the magic ointment. Musicians will tell you, the music isn't in the piano. If it were, we would have to let it vote. At best, what we have is an amplifier. And often, these things that could be amplifiers will turn people away. Pianos often turn people away from music rather than turn them towards it.

So, I think the most important thing, for people who want healthy schools, is to have parental involvement. Because down deep, it's the value system that the children pick up about what's important in life, that they mainly get from their parents, that is going to condition what they do with their time.

It's hard to learn things in school. There are lots of things going on. School, to me, is basically about a resource for finding out that various things existed that you didn't think existed. But as far as learning them, most of the learning, I think, is done outside of school. And what the child decides to do outside of school with his time is going to depend on the value system.

Once you have that going really well, then it's fairly easy to use all kinds of technology. Because then you will simply amplify out from this interest in getting stuff happening in here [in the head].

That was one of McLuhan's tongue-in-cheek jokes. We've had all these great inventions like the book, and they've hardly affected education at all. If you go into most schools in the northern hemisphere, you find 30 humans writing down what another human is saying. That's what was going on in Oxford in the 12th century. Where is the book in all of this?

The kinds of social whirlpools that exist when you get different kinds of humans together, like teachers and children, are going to have a lot to do with whether technology gets used at all. I think the most important aspects have to do with areas of control and other kinds of things which are theoretically outside the domain of the education. A lot of school is about controlling the kids.

We can definitely count on the hardware continuing to improve another decade, and probably more. But this is just extrapolation. The current kinds of hardware that we know how to build have a very stable outlook for the next ten years.

Cyc is one of my favorite projects, partly because it's done by one of the smartest guys in the U.S. in computer science, and partly because it's one of the hardest projects that anybody is trying to do right now. There are not a lot of researchers working on what I would call really frontier difficult projects, but this is one of them.

His success will be, and is about, turning up new ideas for representing things. Whether the system is actually able to turn into what its design goals say it is, which is a model of human common sense, I don't think is nearly as important as the wake that it's throwing up. When you get a smart guy working on something really hard and a bunch of people being ingenious about it, you're always going to get good things.

That's a good question, because common sense is frequently wrong. Scientific discoveries of the last 300 years have been against common sense. But whatever common sense is, it's a kind of underlying fabric for getting between things that we know in much higher detail. One way of thinking about it is, the little things that we're expert in are like islands, and then there's this ocean that we can paddle around in from island to island. There's a way to get from one island to another.

The problem with most expert systems up to now is that they're an island completely surrounded by a cliff. If you go anywhere off what it's good at, it just drops you completely. There's no way of paddling to the next thing. As I said yesterday, Picasso, I think, said, "Art is not the truth. Art is a lie that tells the truth." Common sense is not the truth. But it's a lie that provides a continuous fabric to work around in that we can then delve deeper into.

Another thing about common sense that's kind of interesting is that it might be possible to use the computer to enlarge what we think of as common sense, by giving us sensory contact with things we've never been able to have sensory contact with before. Like things that are a million times smaller than us. Because common sense has a lot to do with the sensory domain, and reasoning from things that are on our scale.

Science, in a very literal sense, is non-sense, because it's outside of the sensory domain. Common sense says this is solid. [Knocking on chair.] But science says it isn't. Common sense says the sun is going to come up tomorrow morning. Science says no, the earth is turning. And yet we still say, what time is sunrise tomorrow?

So I think the importance of Cyc using common sense has a lot to do with, regardless of whether we are scientists or not, we have this one way of knowing the world, rightly or wrongly, that is very comprehensive and gives a sort of universal way of weakly getting from one topic to another.

Some of my favorite crazy people are AI people. AI in the '60s was once defined as all that stuff we don't know how to do yet. To some extent, it's been a moving target. Things that were AI problems in the '50s and '60s are now taught as part of computer engineering courses. But as far as AI as something mimicking, in a strong way, human intelligence, we're very far away from it.

So, it's a good goal. It gives you something to reach for. For people in the field who have some biological motivation to their interest, it's a good goal, because it has partly to do with understanding more how we do it, and wondering if there are alternate ways to do it. Can you only do it the way we do it? At what level do we do it? Do we have to do it at the absolutely neuronal level? Do we have to simulate every neuron in a human brain to get artificial intelligence? Or is there a higher level that we can do it?

Those are good questions to ask, because if you look at the way for instance biochemistry is done by nature, it is appallingly inefficient. Very low energy transfer. The absence of some watcher from the outside saying, oh, it would be much simpler to do it this way. The way we do chemistry in a lab and the way nature does biochemistry is completely different. We do it much more efficiently. Nature does it much more ingeniously because of the way it's contrived. You can learn a lot from looking at the comparison between the two.

So there is a lot of reason to expect that you don't have to go to the neuronal level to be able to do the kinds of things that we do. But nobody knows what level you actually have to go to.

I think people many people will enjoy virtual reality, since many people don't enjoy the current reality. Television is a kind of virtual reality. And I think things that go further in that direction will be very popular with a lot of people.

I think the best thing about virtual reality is that you can deal with things outside of the normal senses. You can take a trip down into a cell and see how incredibly agitated the thermal properties are down there. All the things that you only can read about now in terms of symbols, you can actually go there and get a much more kinesthetic and visual hit on doing those things.

I think the use of it in fantasy will certainly happen. But if you look at what you actually have to do to get good dramatic situations in the theater, then it's going to be a while before something good can happen in a movie that's partly being generated by your presence.

On the other hand, if you look at a typical Arnold Schwarzenegger shoot-em-up, then those will be easy to do. Total Recall, somebody said, if you like road accidents, you'll love this picture. That kind of stuff, where you have five people you have to kill every 30 seconds, is very easy to set up in virtual reality. I'm sure that a large percentage of the population will enjoy it.

Of course you have to be careful, because because simulations are lies, in a sense. There is nothing that says the simulation has to be like real life. There have been plenty of thought experiments that are wrong. Most of the great scientists have been good guessers. You can also set up simulations of situations that don't have anything to do with the physical world. So you can delude yourself as well as help yourself along.

No, I don't think that's a danger. I think that anytime people try and make models, try and look at their beliefs from different points of view rather than just one point of view, I think is good.

There are lots of different ways of doing prediction, but the worst one in the 20th century has been extrapolation. Just because something is X, and 10 percent in some other direction of X gets you here, doesn't mean a thing. It's like, "if a computer could do so and so, it would have to be the size the Empire State Building." Well, that was when people's imaginations were limited by vacuum tubes. So the extrapolative way, I think, is out.

But the reason the predictions that we made in the late '60s were so good, and the reason Bush's predictions in the '40s were so good, had to do with a completely different way of predicting, which had to do with thinking about things that amplify human endeavor. And the amount of horsepower available that is interested in making human endeavor be amplified is very, very large.

If you say, "Oh, the computer is a medium," then all of a sudden you start seeing what the powers of amplification are, and you also start getting ideas about what to do next. You look at, say, Freud's model of human mentality, which is a good one but it's all about drives, it doesn't help you much in doing user interface. You look at Bruner's mental model, which is about different ways we have of knowing the world, and all of a sudden you get ideas.

That's another one of those things that was looking at the kinds of things that computers are doing now. As people used to say, "That's right, you numbskull." It was all the new things that they can do. It's not that we could do we can do payroll on the mainframe when the personal computer came along. It's all those things we couldn't do on the mainframe, like spreadsheets and desktop publishing and so forth.

Well, I would hope so. Ten years ago, if you went into somebody's office and you didn't see a phone, that would have been remarkable. It was the absence of the thing that would have been remarkable. Nowadays if you go into somebody's office and you don't see a phone, you assume they're wearing one. But you do not assume that there is no phone in a person's office. It's something that is noticeable when it's absent.

The computer right now is still more noticeable by its presence than its absence. When you go somewhere and somebody doesn't have a computer on them and that becomes a remarkable thing, then I think the computer will have made it. Its destiny is to disappear into our lives, like all of our really important technology. The things that we don't think of as technology, like wristwatches, and paper and pencil, and clothing, and all of those things. I think the computer's destiny is to be one of those.

I think we have to be careful, because when you simulate one thing by another you usually give up something. Anybody who has ever seen the Book of Kells for real realizes what you don't get from photographs, realizes what you don't get from printed books, and also realizes what you do get from printed books. That compelling charisma, the transcription of the oral event that was a book like the Book of Kells, is completely different from the alienating regularity of machine type. Both those things have their place in the world. You'd hate to get rid of one completely and say, "Well, we're replacing it with the new." I don't think it works that way.

I'm building a rather large baroque pipe organ, even though you can, quote, unquote, simulate them on synthesizers today. The answer is, you can't simulate them. You can't get all of the stuff yet. And even if you could, even if you could prove beyond the shadow of a doubt that the waveforms from it were the same, you still don't get something that looks as neat.

If you include all of our senses into the experience, then when you simulate something, as you always do in science, what you're saying is, "I am going to give up this in order to get that, and that's my trade-off right now." But a person who says, "I'm going to use this, and I'm not going to give up any of that stuff," is just fooling themselves. There isn't a complete interconvertability between one medium and another.

I think one way of rating the computer is to say, it's definitely a thing like the printed book. It is definitely in an unremarkable stage, like 30 years after Gutenberg. And almost certainly, if its promise is realized and it's not just turned into television (because that's one of the things it can simulate as well), but if it can deal with all of the range of things it can deal with, and people use it to express all of those things, then it very likely will have the same kind of effect on our civilization as the printed book did.

Whether it has that effect on any given person, though, is a completely different question. As people have noted, the Renaissance has come and gone, we have what we are pleased to call civilization now, and a large percentage of the population (not just in Third World countries, but in our own country) have never touched the 20th century as far as its ideas are concerned. In spite of all the libraries with all the books, and what books have done to us, a very large percentage of people have never been carried along with them. That is very likely to happen with the computer.

It's probably the case that we never succeed with those things. Civilization gets transformed, and a certain critical mass of people get transformed by it, and they are the ones who transform the civilization. And then, for one reason or another, a large number of people don't get transformed by it.

Another way of thinking about is, if you look at what the average person today who has not been transformed by it, but has gone to college, thinks about the world, it is a little bit better, a little bit richer, than what people thought about the world in 1000 A.D.

Well, you have to learn something. We know that when D.W. Griffith first invented close-ups, and moving cameras, and montages and stuff, the audience was a little bit startled. But it didn't take long. One pass through it, and they got the idea of what was going on. The amount of learning in the visual domain is pretty low compared to what you need to do reading and writing. And that is a big barrier.

The biggest problem, though, is that many people believe that there is an equilibrium between the two media. That what you can say in a book, you can say on television. All of the evidence is against that.

What you can do with television are some very important things. You can get people interested. You can give them an emotional hit. You can get them to know somebody in a way they didn't think they could. You can maybe get them interested enough to look deeper. But its very strength is its weaknesses. Its strength is its involvement, and its weakness is its involvement.

In order to think scientifically about the world, you have to be romantic, it's true, but you also have to be able to step back and say, "Gee, I wonder what else it is. It looks this way, but I wonder what else it is. I wonder what else is going on." I don't think television gets people to do that kind of connected thought away from the dominance of the senses.

Some people read well, and it's nothing for them to read a book a day. And for other people, this is a big deal, it's a struggle. What's likely is going on is that most people never learn to read very well. So the amount of concentration they have to put into the mechanics is what's defeats them with the amount of material that has to be read.

It's remarkable how much concentration you have to put into something like tennis until you learn to play it, or how much concentration you have to put into music, on the mechanics, until you actually get fluent at playing. But once you've gotten to that place then the hours go by without even realizing because you're deep into what the content of the medium is.

I think the thing that surprised me the most is how long it has taken to get ideas out of laboratories into the commercial world. How many different kinds of inertia there are, both for good reason and for bad reason. Just the sheer amount of time. A decade after an idea is a very short period to see it emerging in the commercial world.

That is certainly surprising to me because most of the scientists who work on these things work on them because they were obvious. They were so obvious that they just want to make them. To have them not be obvious, to have something that was revolutionarily obvious go through an evolutionary stage that may take 10 or 20 years, is quite surprising.

I don't see it right now. It's a question of having people grow up being interested in multiple points of view, rather than being disturbed when they're shown something outside of their single way of looking at the world. Our civilization is very prone toward single-minded ways of looking at the world. We come from a monotheistic religious background, which says there's a right and a wrong, and you're either for God or against God, and so forth. These attitudes trickle over into our reactions to everything. If what we're doing now is right, then something that's different from it can't possibly be right.

The Japanese seem to be a little more flexible in some of those scores. They have several religions existing side by side in Japan, and many of the people adhere to several of them at once. They don't see any big conflict. I think any civilization that can treat ideas as interesting, as more interesting in an array than as treated singly, is going to make it into the future.