Here's a clip from a recent interview with Alan Kay - one of the Titans of the personal computer evolution. The article is short and worth reading. In it Alan pays tribute to the founding role Doug Engelbart played as the original catalyst of the PC. The images are taken from a Siggraph poster produced 1997.
"Basically, the reason I work with children and not adults is because adults are famously difficult to change in any significant way. They've made a commitment to the norms of the world they live in. Children are born not knowing what culture they've been born into, how the culture thinks, and what that culture thinks is important. Yet they are born with some built-in patterns of thinking that are universal. Since the late sixties, I've been interested in the extent to which you could cultivate the kind of thinking skills that only a few people use in the world today, by getting children to learn much more widely and much more fluently than most adults have. If you want to make a change, get the children to think differently."
Alan Kay: The PC Must Be Revamped--Now:
To see the original siggraph poster :http://san-diego.siggraph.org/sigkids/Influences.html
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