# Dinner with Alan Kay in Kyoto

- Author: Joichi Ito
- Date: 2003-02-02T00:34:35Z


From left to right: Joi, Alan, DavidDavid Smith has been trying to introduce me to Alan Kay for quite awhile now. We also have a bunch of other mutual friends including Scott Fisher, my brother-in-law who used to work for Alan at Atari and Megan Smith. Alan, David, Kim and the "team" were visiting Kyoto so I invited them to dinner at Minoya, my favorite tea house in Kyoto which I've written about in my blog before. I found a picture of Kaoru, the owner and me from when she was staying with us in the US. I am 3 years old and she is 18 in this photo.

It's a bit difficult to talk about the past, present and future of computing surrounded by geisha in a tea house, but we tried. Alan talked about how so much of great computer science was invited in the 60's and 70's and we're just getting around to re-discovering some of it. It reminded me about my thoughts about ECD. People like to talk about quantum computing and nanotech because it is a long way away and is not threatening to the current products. Technology such as ECD's technology and Alan's architectures which have been feasible for decades is often ignored because it threatens business models and architectures today.

It's great that Japan really respects Alan Kay and gives him a great deal of credit for his discoveries. I think Ted Nelson also gets much more credit for his discoveries in Japan than he does in the US. Maybe foreigners aren't as threatening. ;-)

Alan and David are working on Squeak and are also developing a completely object oriented, cross-platform, networked, collaborative environment called Croquet which sounds very exciting. David's supposed to give me a demo tomorrow.





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