Sublime

Bruce Horn, one of the precocious teens recruited to test Smalltalk, would go on to join the LRG staff, where he contributed to Smalltalk. He later joined Apple and helped design the original Macintosh.109 By describing kids like Horn as a “‘hacker phenomenon,’”110 Kay inadvertently points to another impediment: their designs targeted an idealized

Alan Kay—Apple’s chief scientist and the man who introduced me to Steve Jobs—expressed it well when he said, “The best way to predict the future is to invent it.

1972, Xerox PARC’s Alan Kay had mocked up a prototype of a mobile companion for young children that he called the “Dynabook.”

“You had a set of folks running these machines who were the priesthood of hardware, and the rest of us were railing against it,” says Chris Brown, a software-development manager at the time. “We wanted a playground where we could go to freely try things out.”

Brush up on the prior art:  “We were intellectually excited about going down that path of this general space of software creation. So we spent a lot of time doing research. It was almost like being on a sabbatical, reading all this prior art of old computing pioneers, like  Douglas Engelbart  and  Bill Atkinson , and even conte