Alan Kay was there at the very beginning. He spent 10 years at Xerox PARC, culminating in that famous visit Steve Jobs made that ultimately spawned the Mac.
This is a bit of a walk down memory lane and a nice little read.
Alan Kay talks about meeting Steve Jobs and the 2007 iPhone keynote
Here’s another great story written by Bruce Horn, a Xerox PARC employee and how Jobs convinced him to take a job at Apple:
https://www.folklore.org/StoryView.py?project=Macintosh&story=Joining_the_Mac_Group.txt
Alan Kay coined several phrases we’ve heard over the years regarding technology, hardware and the future. Original Macintosh team member Andy Hertzfeld was at a Kay seminar and wrote about it:
https://www.folklore.org/StoryView.py?project=Macintosh&story=Creative_Think.txt
Oh, that’s good stuff Dave, thanks for the share! It’s funny that Steve brought him there to the iPhone intro because he was going to use a quote of his, then Alan dropped another quote that Steve ended up using for the iPad. What a mind.
Yeah, he seems to drop iconic tech quotes the way Mitch Hedberg dropped non-sequiturs.
Kay is an incredible guy. In the early Mac days he came up to Eugene at my request to talk with my Mac users group. While there we took him on a tour of a local mechanical organ builder (Kay is into organs). He was great with the Mac group and a lot of fun to be around. His importance in the history of personal and portable computing has not gone unnoticed, by Jobs back then and by many since.
In the 60s to the 80s people like Kay were known and celebrated in the computer industry because it was much smaller and just forming. Now we celebrate tech billionaires who create something whizzy, sell it to a huge tech company and haven’t really moved the needle much.
I was just kind of thinking along these lines about baseball the other day…or more particularly about the front office people that run teams. “Back in the day” they were giants that accomplished much bigger things than it seems they do now. But your comment gets me thinking, that’s probably the nature of any mature industry. The early leaders get the mammoth task of creating institutions…those that come later get the less-inspiring task of using those institutions efficiently.
But every so often you DO get someone that comes later that breaks that mold: Branch Rickey was there at the right time to bring Jackie Robinson to the major leagues…and Steve Jobs was there at the right time to introduce the iPhone. Those are the real mega-idols: those that entirely disrupt a mature industry. But aren’t those once-in-a-lifetime kinds of people?