Tony: I briefly knew Kay way back when he was at PARC. I saw one his first presentations of the Star Computer way back in the 1970′s. I was just down the road from Xerox PARC and went down there all the time. Smalltalk it still one of the best OOPL’s around. Not used much for anything commercial though. Too intelligent of an language for that.

I also heard one of his dynabook “lectures” back then. He said something to the effect that “one day you will be able to sit in Central Park under a tree and access the Librry of Congress over radio waves form a computer the size of a book.” Most of the people in the room had punched cards at one time or another. Much of this work ws before there were PC’s. The Lisa was modeled hafter the star but that waas almost a decade later.

Everyone thought he was nuts. I remember people looking at each other and scratching their heads. Around that time the Sanford AI Lab had a computer that had like a megabyte of RAM and people just used come down and look at it it was such a big deal (Intel made the first 1K DRAM chips in something like 1969, to put that in perspective). It is amazing that Kay could have see this back then and keep pulling for it when our tech was so primitive. What a true visionary. I have a deep admiration for him. A profoundly creative computer scientist.