Illustrating Alan Kay's Role in Portable Computing
It's usual practice for a magazine to run an excerpt of a book written by one of its editors. However, BusinessWeek went one step further and converted an excerpt from senior editor Steve Hamm's new book into a comic or manga. His book, The Race for Perfect: Inside the Quest to Design the Ultimate Portable Computer, is “a popular history of portable computing and also a narrative of a single, contemporary product (Lenovo’s X300) as it travels from conception to the marketplace.” Here's the first panel of this version, which tells the story of Alan Kay, one of the creative visionaries and inventors of the computer revolution.
Steve wrote in his Globespotting blog that one of his purposes in writing the book "was to get young people interested in being engineers, designers, inventors, and entrepreneurs." Make magazine shares that goal.
I use Alan Kay's famous quote in my talks: "The best way to predict the future is to invent it." I take the liberty of substituting "make" for "invent." I would love to have Alan Kay come to Maker Faire.
View the rest of Alan Kay series on the BusinessWeek website
the latest
latest episodes
I can't help being picky
That quote about the future is actually from the great Managment Expert - Peter Drucker - who said "the best way to predict the future is to create it".
I like 'invent' just as well, actually.
Sounds similar to Tracy Kidder's Soul of a New Machine.
I've known Alan for about 20 years and the strip does a nice job of catching the essence. Good job!
As for the quote - well I'm fairly sure it was an Alan original but that doesn't mean nobody else thought of it independently or even previously.
And if you've never played with Smalltalk you're missing out on the only almost-acceptable computer language. All the others - all of them - are unacceptable.
Bravo to hear that Alan Kay is getting some well deserved recognition. As a long time fan of smalltalk I concur with Tim above, that it is a truly sensible programming language that even non-programmers can appreciate. And yes, it was Alan who is the source of the 'invent the future' quotation.