Software Industry / Computer Science Forgetting it's History. (Albert Einstein and Alan Kay)

It is now about 35 years since the term Object Oriented was coined, and first implementations of an Object Oriented system started to be built in the Xerox-PARC research group. It is amazing what this group achieved in the 10 years between 1970 and 1980:

• - For all practical purposes, invented personal computing, including what later became "the laptop".


• - Built implementations of Smalltalk, first Object system, Late-bound, using a Virtual Machine, Collection library etc (stuff that Java took and brought to the masses).


• - Overlapping windows, method to put graphics on the screen was invented and implemented.


• - First Laser printer was built.

This research did rest on shoulders of other giants, underlying reseach and ideas were developed in the 1960s in Lisp, Simula and other languages, people like Sutherland, Engelbart, and others, but most of these things have one name on it:

Alan Kay

What is interesting to me, is a comparison of general awareness of how much Alan Kay ment for "Computer Science" with what people like Einstein, Pauli, Heisenberg and others ment to physics at the beginning of the 20th century.

35 years after special theory of relativity was about 1940, 35 years after beginnings of Quantum Theory was roughly 1955-1960. I am sure in 1940 any physics university student knew who Einstein was, and I am sure in 1955 any physics student knew the names of Pauli and Heisenberg and their contribution to physics. In fact, I would bet many high school students those years knew these names and had some idea what these people did.

Yet, 35 years after these ideas were gelled, I am yet to find a workplace, with computer development professionals using "Object Oriented Technologies" who would not wonder "Alan Kay who?". At the best people have some idea Smalltalk existed (and mostly think it's dead). All people know is Bill Gates and Steve Jobs, who both just borrowed his stuff... Engelbart, at best is remembered as "inventor of the mouse" yet he did so much more.

I do not know what this ignorance means, perhaps just that the mainstream computing is not much of a science but more or less a glorified fashion industry (well, not even glorified)!

PS: Also amusing is that in 2006 that I am manually entering < p > <b> and other symbols (as at-ld-semicolon if I want to show them) right into the blog text to format it.