I enjoyed Walter Isaacson’s biography, Steve Jobs, immensely. In the late 1980s I had the pleasure of being a speaker at a personal computing conference sponsored by The Conference Board in New York City. Dr. Alan Kay, a senior fellow with Apple at the time, was a keynote speaker at the same conference. During the speakers’ luncheon prior to the event, Dr. Kay spoke of the work he had done at Xerox’s Palo Alto Research Center (PARC). He had a hand in developing the first graphical user interface and object-oriented programming.
What really stuck with me, though, was an analogy he shared. At the turn of the 20th century, people started thinking about the pervasiveness of electric motors. For many years they were used in machine shops via pulleys. He laughed about the notion of a mammoth motor installed in the attic of each home across the land, with a series of pulleys running throughout the house powering appliances. Later the electric motor did, indeed, become dominate, but it wasn’t until they completely “vanished within the infrastructure”, i.e., disappeared within each appliance, that it reached its position of dominance.
Similarly, according to Dr. Kay, computers would become dominate in our lives, but not in the form of the day, i.e., the large-scale “mainframe” computer. As with the electric motor, dominance would occur only after the form factor shrank dramatically, i.e., personal and embedded computing devices. It’s been almost 25 years since Alan Kay imparted those words to his small audience. Since then, microprocessors have been integrated into almost every piece of machinery and equipment in our lives. Dr. Kay’s prescience was truly remarkable, and I feel most fortunate to have been his student that day.