Kay’s own 1969 thesis incorporated these ideas and others into what must be one of the oddest dissertations ever submitted for a doctorate in a scientific discipline, featuring as it did epigraphs from, among others, W. H. Auden, J. S. Bach, and Kahlil Gibran (“You would touch with your fingers the naked body of your dreams”). The hand-drawn illustrations included not only complex diagrams of functions and logical trees but line drawings of fanciful single-user machines. These had screen, keyboard, and mouse unified into a desktop console, a big brother to the portable all-purpose computer
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