Hacker News Highlights, the Alan Kay Edition
I&#x27;ll try to reply to this in sections. One way to think of &quot;magic&quot; is height of leap. Newton had something before him, but his leap was cosmic. I don&#x27;t think we&#x27;ve had a Newton yet in computing, but we have had some cosmic leaps. Just to pick a few: Sketchpad, Lisp, and the B5000 ideas all had something before them, but their leaps were enormous.<p>In the &quot;Early History of Smalltalk&quot; I mentioned that I had seen and partly learned the B5000 while in the Air Force ca 1963. I say &quot;partly&quot; because I didn&#x27;t understand all the implications until a few years later in grad school. For example, I did understand what was great about the byte codes and stack mechanisms, but it took until later to really grok that the machine was organized so that environments and access were -granted-, and that the protected tagged pointers -- Descriptors -- could not be forged, and that the actual code contained no addresses. (This was the real start of &quot;capability-style protection.) Also, the multi-tasking OS -- written in an Extended Algol -- was not just the first OS in a higher level language, but was more profound than Algol (it was &quot;Simula&quot; before Simula). This was done extremely well because -- and most people don&#x27;t realize this -- the B5000 had multiple CPUs!<p>More in a next note ...