Has profit replaced prophet in the IT industry? Marshall McLuhan warned us that a new medium takes its initial contact from old media. You can see from the stuff that IBM had been doing in business that what people wanted was more convenient paper! It was only really the research community, Arpa, that had dreams and a sense of destiny about a symbiotic partner and a worldwide network. Only a few hundred people were interested in those things then.
Has the excitement and 'pioneer spirit' been lost? No, because we didn't invent the IT revolution in the 70s. We glimpsed it, and made some qualitative strides up to the first plateau. Maybe we've slipped back a little in the past 20 years. The funding situation for computer science research now, though, is the worst it's been in my 41-year career.
Did you envisage laptops being as profligate? Sure. We almost shouldn't get credit for figuring that out! That was like 'if the human's first then what should their computer look like?' A portable notebook? There was enough knowledge to know the portable was going to happen. Flat-screen displays were starting to evolve when we were working on the Dynabook, so that was an easy choice as well.
Is the portable the future? A vision you could possibly trace back to Negroponte in the 70s was the idea that you'll just have a watch that knows who you are and, as you walk around, your user interface to this ubiquitous network follows you. The people that followed my time at Xerox called this "ubiquitous computing". One way to look at it is that you aim to deliver as many pixels as you can into the user's eyes. Another thing the Arpa community predicted was the "Negroponte implosion". That's where show business, publishing and computing coalesce. The most interesting thing about those predictions is how many people couldn't see it!
How did the Smalltalk user interface evolve? There were GUIs (Graphical User Interfaces) in the 60s, several of which had multiple windows. They were line-drawing not video displays, so the difficulty in doing windowed interfaces was that you had to somehow find where the window boundary would clip a line extended outside the display boundary. At PARC (Palo Alto Research Center) we'd decided we were going to use a raster, video-type display; so it occurred to me that as you refreshed a window on a raster display it would look like that whole rectangle came up to the top - as if you'd scattered papers on your desk.
Favourite sites? Google.com ) because it's the gateway! I'm not a huge fan of the web as much as what the next thing will be. We're working on exciting stuff at www.squeak.org and the educational site www.squeakland.org.
