Anyone familiar with Smalltalk or the work of Xerox PARC between 1970 and 1980 has heard of Alan Kay. Kay has to be one of the greatest minds and greatest contributors to modern technology in our time.

My recent interest in Smalltalk lead me to a video presentation by Alan Kay in 1987. That time seems like the plasticine era, just as Kay remarked about the 1960s. The video, “Doing with Images Makes Symbols”, highlights the developments of early CAD systems, origins of object oriented programming, human interface devices, and culminates with absolutely fantastic developments at Xerox PARC. Kays quips about the state of technology in 1987 underscores the monumental gap between research and commercialization, something that is just as true today.

I strongly encourage anyone with any interest in technology to watch this video. The streaming version is of low quality, so I would suggest downloading the entire 256 kb MPEG4 file and viewing offline. It’s about 120 MB and runs 40 minutes or so.

There is a second part to this video, which is slightly longer, and includes several examples of interdisciplinary learning applied to computer interface design. If you have every wanted to learn to play tennis, this is a quick introduction! Further, interviews with Alan Kay expose key ideas, such as the importance of the aesthetic in almost any field, particularly science and engineering.

After watching this video, I can’t help but wonder if Steve Jobs was heavily influenced by Alan Kay and his ideas. Clearly the aesthetic has been central to the Macintosh and more recently the wildly succesful iPod.