alan kay: "... I needed a group because I had finally realized that I did not have all of the temperaments required to completely finish an idea. I called it the Learning Research Group (LRG) to be as vague as possible about our charter. I only hired people that got stars in their eyes when they heard about the notebook computer idea ...."

and i can imagen how adele goldberg had that "stars in her eyes" and she was at stanford: at the right place at the right time. adele goldberg: "the story of my life is an accident." well, but she did a lot to make things happen :))

personal distributed computing: the alto and ethernet software ( paper was presented at the ACM conference on the history of personal workstations, palo alto, jan. 1986)

why alto? this memo discusses the reasons for making a substantial number (10-30) of copies of the personal computer called Alto which has been designed by Chuck Thacker and others. The original motivation for this machine was provided by Alan Kay, who needs about 15-20 'interim Dynabooks' Systems for his education research. Alto has a much broader range of applications than this origin might suggest, however. I will begin by outlining its characteristics, and then go on to consider some of the many exciting uses to which Alto can be put. It turns out that there is some interaction with almost every CSL research program.

xerox internal memorandum presented by microsoft :))

other butler lampson publications to look through ...

from a long day with what you normaly would call colleagues: news world media conference en barna. but the guys from cnn are as stupid as on screen; the lady from reuters: "is it our job to put the framework right or just to give the business people a broader audiance"??? argh, what kind of journalism is that??? bbc- i thing the management offices back there must be really empty now - is better, but listening to those people talking about business news, dot coms is really frustrating. lesson not learned, i would say. also there was this discussion about whom to blame for all the rubbish that is out there: bloomberg: not us, cnbc - oh there are the news today at new york times: we are loosing money? shame on us: our listener lost some money? nonono, we are not to blame. you lost some money?, we feel sorry. talking about the technology behind? it is too complicated, you can´t ask that from these poor journalists, who have to provide business news.

there was a so called futurist on a panel: peter kingsley, talking about video on demand, - as being the future LOL, streaming and semantik web - without saying more than dropping names- also weblogs got mentioned - i have to say. but i don´t think anyone in the audience understood what he ment with that anyhow. actually i don´t think he knows anything about it. just a name to drop. i got on him real hard at the so called dinner from pujol - governour of catalunia - which was no more than cava and tapas. so i got even more cynical about these media people - haven´t eaten the whole day. talking with this former stanford guy, giving him a hard time, and after that i was just passed around to the organizer, bbc, dma, cnbc, pjr, itn and the hack whatever blablabla guy - but god sake i hate tv and i really hate business channels. they just don´t get it right.

but i got an invitation to paris :)) - crazy media world.