Alan Kay on user interfaces

This talk tells the story of the design of the "windows and mouse" style of user interface, commonly associated with the Apple Macintosh. We start in the 60's with Sketchpad, NLS and Grail, and see how these seminal ideas influenced the SmallTalk work with children at Xerox PARC. Finally, we explore human psychology and the multi-mentality theories that helped the PARC designer's work.

"In this first part of Alan Kay's lecture "Doing with Images Makes Symbols" from 1987, Dr. Kay speaks of a system developed in the 1970's. He says "For the first time I felt like I was touching the information structures." You get the sense watching this video that you're connecting with the people who invented all of the various input devices, metaphors, UI widgets, interaction designs, that together make what we call a computer. He ends his review of UI's from the 60's and 70's with a discussion of how computers are changing from trains (mainframes) to cars (pc) to media. Very insightful and relevant stuff, here. Amazing that in some ways we have not come very far at all."

Alan Kay joined Xerox Corporation's Palo Alto Research Center (PARC) in 1970. In the seventies he was one of the key members there to develop prototypes of networked workstations using the programming language Smalltalk. These inventions were later commercialized by Apple with the Apple Macintosh. Alan Kay is one of the fathers of the idea of object-oriented programming, along with some colleagues at PARC and predecessors at the Norwegian Computing Centre. He is the conceiver of the Dynabook concept which defined the basics of the laptop computer and the tablet computer and he is also considered by some as the architect of the modern windowing GUI. From Wikipedia.