HN Theater @HNTheaterMonth

⬐ dboreham

I visited Disney in 1997 with my boss. They were using our product and had some bugs to report, or feature suggestions, I forget exactly. Sitting with the guy reporting the bugs at his desk, I mentioned in passing that "Alan Kay works somewhere at Disney doesn't he?". My counterpart responds "oh, yeah he sits there" (pointing to the other side of the partition we're both facing). I'm like "shearight", so I walk around and sure enough there's the nameplate (or some other evidence that it was indeed AK's desk, long ago I forget the details). Sadly he was not at his desk.

⬐ neilv

I wonder how many people have almost-met stories about Alan Kay. :)

IIRC, my potential one was pre-dawn in Central Square, up the street from MIT, and I go into the Dunkin Donuts for a coffee. The only other customer in there was ordering a bunch of donut holes, and looked like Alan Kay... Then he adds, like an afterthought, something like, "It's for kids".

(My immediate guess was, if it was Kay, he was probably collaborating with a particular professor's group nearby. I'm not sure why I didn't say hello to a suspected one of my heroes, but I suppose I was still in deserted nighttime Central Square don't-get-stabbed street mode, and so the situation seemed a bit surreal. And the Boston area culture isn't big on acknowledging strangers, even in less-threatening daytime conditions.)

⬐ DonHopkins

That was probably around 1982-1984, when Alan Kay was Chief Scientist at Atari, and set up Atari Cambridge Research Lab.

Atari Cambridge Research- part 1 - Cynthia Solomon:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CR2CwKculBU

>This is a demonstration of some of the works in progress from July 1982 to April, 1984. From learning Logo, a look at our work at introducing people to computers, to music with some of our futuristic instruments. We'll take you on a tour of our lab. Director or Research, Cynthia Solomon.

>I'm Cynthia Solomon. You're about to see some of the research that has been going on at the Atari Cambridge Research Laboratory. I've been its director since we started in 1982. The staff consisted of 22 full time research and support people, as well as 10 consultants.

>Our research has been motivated by our past experiences in the Logo Group at the MIT Artificial Intelligence Laboratory, where we worked with Seymour Papert and Marvin Minsky.

>We wanted to get Logo out of the laboratory and into the world. We wanted to share it, and share its potential as a powerful too for thinking. And so before we joined Atari, many of us were part of the development team at Logo Computer Systems, where we designed, implemented, and documented Apple Logo.

>When we finished Apple Logo, I left Logo Computer Systems. I wanted to get back to doing research. I contacted Alan Kay, who was Chief Scientist at Atari, and it turned out he was interested in setting up a research laboratory in Cambridge, near MIT.

>He was familiar with our previous Logo research, and was enthusiastic about supporting our new work.

>We began to explore the following areas:

>We looked at was of controlling computers by gestures: by touch, by gross body movement.

>We designed an object oriented Logo, and developed applications in it.

>We built several mechanical devices to add new dimensions to computing environments.

>We began to build tools toward a musical play station.

>And as always, we continued our work with children.

The other parts of this video and many more amazing historic videos are in Cynthia Solomon's youtube channel:

https://www.youtube.com/user/cynthiaso/videos

Atari Cambridge Research- part 2: Margaret Minsky, Danny Hillis, David Wallace (gumby!): a gestural system, touch screens, force sensitivity, painting, visual programming, button box inspired by Warren Robinett's "Rocky's Boots" program

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-Wq6SQTVM9M

Rocky's Boots:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rocky%27s_Boots

Alan Kay on Rocky's Boots, Robot Odyssey, and visual programming:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17422497

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21899376

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17423040

Atari Cambridge Research- part 3: Ed Hardebeck: a video body gestural system; QLogo: Gary Drescher, Jeremy Jones, Steven Hain

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ClKQHgIoLPc

Atari Cambridge Research- part 4: Michael Granfield: Choriographer's Workstation; Marionette Machine: Mark Gross; Max Bohensky: Force Feedback Joystick

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=R3qPCZ5z0UQ

Atari Cambridge Research- part 5: Music Box: David Levitt

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ocwsVkqEKys

Atari Cambridge Research- part 6: Music Box: Tom Trobaugh, Drum Machine: Jim Davis

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DhA0FGsin_s

Atari Cambridge Research- part 6: Marvin Minsky 1984 closing remarks

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7rg4a18svBQ

Another talk by Alan Kay from 1987:

Alan Kay: Doing with Images Makes Symbols (Full Version)

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=p2LZLYcu_JY

⬐ neilv

The doppelganger was probably around 2000-2010, and my guess at the time was probably getting donuts for some morning children's program / human subjects in collaboration with Mitch Resnick's group.

I didn't know a lot of those people had been involved with Atari Cambridge Research, thanks for the info. It's a small world.

⬐ neilv

Talk starts at 6 minutes in:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=m5L3EEWBJQw&t=6m

The audio is pretty quiet.

⬐ xkriva11

I like Alan's talk about education: https://youtu.be/dTPI6wh-Lr0

⬐ briane80

That guy stuffing his face like it's a movie theater.

⬐ gjvc

most off-putting.

⬐ matteovh

Wow. I was in that class listening to the lecture. Surreal to see this posted on Hacker News.

⬐ aduitsis

Slightly off-topic, but besides all the important contributions of Alan Kay, there is also his famous quote:

> Point of view is worth 80 IQ points

The wisdom of it is that it suggests a profound change in the point of view of what intelligence is. Although I suspect this must have been researched well before the quote, it summarizes so beautifully the fact that intelligence isn't just some single-dimensional hard coded genetic trait, but something transferable and even contagious through language. Love that quote.

⬐ jonahx

The quote isn't an argument against IQ. Here is a 3 minute video of Kay elaborating the idea:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FI9rPNxFG5Y

You'll notice he presupposes that IQ exists, is real, and is important. He just also notes that its effect will be dwarfed by having access to paradigm-changing ideas and knowledge.

"If you can get a supreme genius to invent calculus, those of us with normal IQs can learn it"

⬐ Tommabeeng

In prior talk(s) he’s famous for saying “IQ is a lead weight”.

⬐ creamytaco

Akan Kay is obviously referring to "genius", someone who is able to see things outside of the consensus POV and make leaps that others can't. Alas, this is not transferable through language. There have been precious few that fit the characterization of genius, and fewer still recognised today, due to contempary societal conditions being actively hostile to it: https://geniusfamine.blogspot.com/

⬐ MaysonL

±

⬐ locallost

I've seen him mention this in talks and the example he used was that Leonardo da Vinci was smarter than Henry Ford, but he couldn't build anything he envisioned because he was born in the wrong century. So I think he meant something a bit different, that knowledge of something somebody else solved can be more valuable than raw intelligence.