"Turn up your nose at good ideas. You must work on great ideas, not good ones" - I admire Alan Kay deeply and love reading his writings and philosophy. I respect how he inspired the early generations to do incredible things - but for me personally he is a warning to not be hung up on 'great' ideas. He was ahead of his time in the 70s, but the world flew by. Even today he dwells on dynabooks, smalltalk, etc in his lectures - all innovative ideas for its time... but they never evolved and don't translate well in today's world (see One Laptop per Child)
Ideas can have a long gestation period. Neural networks were invented before even the 1950s. I read about them as a child of the 1970s as "learning machine". They only became a smash success in the last 10-12 years.
Of course, even if someone knows they have a great idea and is willing to wait for it to flower, there's certainty that will happen in their lifetime.
He keeps talking about them because they're important visions that society badly needs. The vision behind the Dynabook, that of a true personal dynamic medium, has still not been realized.
>He was ahead of his time in the 70s, but the world flew by. Even today he dwells on dynabooks, smalltalk, etc in his lectures - all innovative ideas for its time... but they never evolved and don't translate well in today's world (see One Laptop per Child)
Part of why the world "flew by" is because those ideas existed and informed what came next. And even today what he have falls short of many of those ideas (most modern dynamic languages are worse than Smalltalk in many if not most aspects for example, except adoption).
There's lots of different takes on why it failed, you can search 'olpc criticisms' on google and you'll find many articles with endless takes. To me they had many 'great' and inspiring design ideas that were completely out of touch with reality. For example, trying to put a handcrank on a laptop and the completely unfamiliar UI.
It was also because MS and Intel sabotaged it. OLPC probably would have never worked anyway but the actions taken by the two companies left a very sour taste for me. Also, the “right-click any program in order to see its source-code” was an idea many generations ahead of its time, one that I’m afraid we won’t ever get to see, actually.
Partly due to Alan Kay's STEPS project failure to release meaningful code sources, you're right..
Frank ( https://www.vpri.org/pdf/tr2012001_steps.pdf ) would have had A LOT of interested developer/user if they had released the code.
