"brown jonathan%e.mfenet"@LLL-MFE.ARPA (11/07/85)
There has been a number of claims as to who originated the term "personal computer." The following is an excerpt from an interview with Alan Kay by Kevin Strehlo, which appeared in Computer Currents, The Bay Area's Own Computer Newsmagazine, Third Year, Number 11, page 37: Strehlo: What's the impact of IBM being so important in personal computing? Kay: I think there are two things to think about. One is that they haven't made a personal computer yet. --> I was the one who made up the phrase personal computer, <-- and they haven't made one. One of our tests for whether a machine is a personal computer is whether people would be willing to do anything so mundane as to put their grocery list on it. Also in this interview, Alan talks about Project Bivarium. He envisions building animal-like creatures that you send on missions, such as finding information out of a network. Perhaps one of his creatures will stumble upon this message someday. Jonathan Brown "brown jonathan%cma.mfenet"@lll-mfe.arpa
JMRatcliff.es@XEROX.ARPA (11/08/85)
Alan Kay seems to get credit for a lot of ideas. It has been my experience that ideas are often created and developed by a team while a few individuals get away with claiming all of the credit for them. Alan Kay seems to be living off his reputation - has anything he has done at Atari or Apple made those companies any money? Jeff Ratcliff