Alan Kay: The PC Must Be Revamped—Now - ' Clearing the Path to '

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Innovation"> Clearing the Path to Innovation

In addition to a mindset that prevents real innovation, is the technology inside the machine itself a problem?

The types of disk drives we have are slightly faster than Moore's Law predicted for silicon. Costs have gone down pretty well. But there are bottlenecks. The architectures have not advanced near to Moore's Law proportions. Possibly, back in the mid-1980s, all the machines that were on the Internet put together were approximately equal to a top-of-the-line desktop or laptop computer today. But if you look at how the Internet has scaled since then, the operating system and other software inside your machine hasn't scaled well. Why doesn't my machine look like an Internet inside? Because the Internet is a scalable architecture made up of real machines that are made up out of virtual machines. And that concept could actually be used as a basis for an operating environment that essentially doesn't have an operating system.

There isn't a particularly good reason this hasn't happened; it's just that the dominant operating system architectures that we have are all from the sixties. Basically, the people who do operating systems got used to this kind of layered architecture in an operating system, and they tend to keep on feeding it, even though layered systems don't scale very well. This is an example of the invisibility of normality. We're not even aware that we're accepting most things we accept. Any creative person has to try and force their brain to reconsider things that are accepted so widely they seem like laws of the universe. Very often they aren't laws of the universe; they're just conventions.

The Viewpoints Research Institute is supporting several technologies and projects aimed at inventing fundamentally new ways of computing. What are Squeak and Croquet, and are there others?

Squeak, an object-oriented operating system and authoring environment, is actually the Xerox PARC Smalltalk operating system, upgraded to 32-bit graphics with other things added. My research group at Apple did it about ten years ago, because we were afraid that Java wasn't going to be compatible from computer to computer. Because we made our own software tools at Xerox PARC, and we had some of the same people who had done these tools, we decided we'd be much safer if we just made our own vehicle. At Viewpoints and Hewlett-Packard, we built an operating system for children, and also did many experiments in user-interface design and built new kinds of object models and other kinds of things called Etoys.
You can think of Croquet as a new way of doing an operating system, or as a layer over TCP/IP that automatically coordinates dynamic objects over the entire Internet in real time. This coordination is done efficiently enough so that people with just their computers, and no other central server, can work in the same virtual shared space in real time. It's mature enough to be supported by the Open Source Foundation and there is a start-up company called Qwaq that is working with Croquet. (I'm not part of the start-up.) We brought together David Reed—Croquet is a working model of his 1970s thesis—with other talented people, and funded them.

The Viewpoints Research Institute is actually involved in three new projects. One is the $100 laptop project that Nicholas Negroponte is doing. That is coming along very well. The first 1,000 factory-built machines were built in the last few weeks. The plan is to build 5 million to 8 million laptops this summer, and perhaps as many as 50 million in 2008. We're very involved in that. The other thing is a recently funded NSF project that will take a couple of giant steps, we hope, toward reinventing programming. The plan is to take the entire personal-computing experience from the end user down to the silicon and make a system from scratch that recapitulates everything people are used to—desktop publishing, Internet experiences, etc.—in less than 20,000 lines of code. It would be kind of like a Moore's Law step in software. It's going to be quite difficult to do this work in five years, but it will be exciting.

The third project we're just getting started on and don't have completely funded yet, is to make a new kind of user interface that can actually help people learn things, from very mundane things about how their computer system works to more interesting things like math, science, reading and writing. This project came about because of the $100 laptop. In order for the $100 laptop to be successful in the educational realm, it has to take on some mentoring processes itself. This is an old idea that goes all the way back to the sixties. Many people have worked on it. It just has never gotten above threshold.

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