Keynote Address 5
“The Computer Revolution”, “Computer Science”, and “Software Engineering” Haven't Happened Yet

Alan Kay
 Hewlett Packard, USA
alan.kay@hp.com

Abstract

If we compare with “The Printing Revolution”, and “Modern Science and Engineering in the Physical World”, then we have to conclude that the computer versions of these haven’t happened yet. The printing revolution was not the hardware technology that allowed the automation of hand written texts such as bibles, but a much longer learning curve that brought about new ways to think and argue, culminating in the 17th century with new ways to understand the physical and political universes in which humans live. This created our modern world. By contrast we are still generally “automating bibles” with computers and the “new ways to think and argue” are still being invented and haven’t reached most computer users.

Similarly, if we compare the state of software building against modern engineering – such as the building of the Empire State Building in New York City from scratch in less than one year with less than 3000 coordinated workers – then we can hardly claim “software engineering” to be much past ancient Egyptian pyramid building: millions of lines of code-bricks piled on top of each other with little coordination or discernable architecture.

A science is generally about finding better models about structures in the universe. As Simon pointed out, ours is a “science of the artificial” like a “science of bridges”. We first have to make structures and then study them to create better theories. We might claim that McCarthy's LISP-in-itself as a kind of “Maxwell's Equations”, but we still lack the equivalent “Special Theory” that includes the handling of time in a reasonable and useful way. The immense commercialization of computing that happened in the 80s and 90s disrupted much of the progress in each of these areas, especially in the US. It’s now time to ask again what these three ideas should mean, and then get back to the real work of advancing our field and making the real computer revolution happen.

Biography

Alan Kay is one of the earliest pioneers of object-oriented programming, personal computing and graphical user interfaces. His contributions been recognized with the Charles Stark Draper Prize of the National Academy of Engineering, the A.M. Turing Award from the Association of Computing Machinery, and the Kyoto Prize from the Inamori Foundation. This work was done in the rich context of ARPA and Xerox PARC with many talented colleagues.

While at the ARPA project at the University of Utah in the late 60s, he invented dynamic object-oriented programming, was part of the original team that developed continuous tone 3D graphics, was the codesigner of the FLEX Machine, an early desktop computer with graphical user interface and object-oriented operating system, conceived the Dynabook, a laptop personal computer for children of all ages, and participated in the design of the ARPAnet.

At Xerox PARC, inspired by children, he invented Smalltalk (with important contributions by Dan Ingalls), the first completely object-oriented authoring and operating system (which included the now ubiquitous overlapping window interface), instigated the bit-map screen, screen painting and animation, participated in desk-top publishing, other desktop media, and the development of the Alto, the first modern networked personal computer. This was part of the larger process at PARC that created an entire genre of personal computing including: the Ethernet, Laserprinters, modern word processing, client-servers and peer-peer networking.

He has been a Xerox Fellow, Chief Scientist of Atari, Apple Fellow, and Disney Fellow. In 2001 he founded Viewpoints Research Institute, a non-profit organization dedicated to children and learning. He is currently a Senior Fellow at HP Labs, an Adjunct Professor of Computer Science at UCLA and a Visiting Professor at Kyoto University. He has been elected a Fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, the National Academy of Engineering, the Royal Society of Arts, and the Computer History Museum.

He has a BA in Mathematics and Biology with minor concentrations in English and Anthropology from the University of Colorado, 1966. MS and PhD in Computer Science (both with distinction) from the University of Utah, 1968 and 1969, and an Honorary Doctorate from the Kungl Tekniska Hoegskolan in Stockholm.