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As Gutenberg invented the tools and methods for turning words into a mass medium, the 66-year-old Kay and a stable of regular collaborators invented much of what we recognize as a modern PC. At Xerox's legendary Palo Alto Research Center (PARC) in the 1970s, Kay designed Smalltalk, the first object-oriented programming language; he helped create Alto, the prototype PC whose icons, windows and point-and-click interface catalyzed the Macintosh; and he participated in the early design of ARPANet, the precursor to the Internet. While Kay's work helped fashion the tools that built the modern IT industry, his real passion is computing for children. That's the challenge that animates his work on such recent projects as "One Laptop Per Child," better known as the "$100 Laptop" initiative; and Squeak, a modern Smalltalk implementation aimed at giving kids a tool for creating their own media and models. Why children? In kids, Kay sees the potential for the original, intuitive leaps that spark major advances. "Children don't know the way the world is supposed to be," he says. "In all of the revolutions, it was the children who did it—usually several generations of children." Kay would like to see the world of computing shaken afresh by a few innovation cataclysms. He says he's taken aback by how routine it has become. "In the last 25 years we went from people thinking about all this stuff very carefully to people who are not thinking about it at all, just using existing goal structures," he says. "People digitize things: accounting systems, records, photos. People are occupying themselves with imitations of old media." |
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