Visible within the flood of ideas is the Alan Kay who made computing cool. He declared publicly that it was all right to use three-million-dollar machines to play games and “screw around.” If that meant grad students were blasting digital rocket ships off their computer screens in a game called “Spacewar,” it was all part of the weaving of new technology into the cultural fabric. His unashamed view of the computer as very much a toy liberated many others to explore its genius for procedures other than the parsing of numbers and the sequencing of databases—to see it, in other words, as a
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