Dinner with Alan Kay in Kyoto.
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From left to right: Joi, Alan, David |
David Smith has been trying to introduce me to Alan Kay for quite awhile now. We also have a bunch of other mutual friends including Scott Fisher, my brother-in-law who used to work for Alan at Atari and Megan Smith. Alan, David, Kim Rose and the "team" were visiting Kyoto so I invited them to dinner at Minoya, my favorite tea house in Kyoto which I've written about in my blog before.I found a picture of Kaoru, the owner and me from when she was staying with us in the US. I am 3 years old and she is 18. It's a bit difficult to talk about the past, present and future of computing surrounded by geisha in a tea house, but we tried. Alan talked about how so much of great computer science was invented in the 60's and 70's and we're just getting around to re-discovering some of it. It reminded me about my thoughts about ECD. People like to talk about quantum computing and nanotech because it is a long way away and is not threatening to the current products. Technology such as ECD's technology and Alan's architectures which have been feasible for decades are often ignored because it threatens business models and architectures today. It's great that Japan really respects Alan Kay and gives him a great deal of credit for his discoveries. I think Ted Nelson also gets much more credit for his discoveries in Japan than he does in the US. Maybe foreigners aren't as threatening. ;-) Alan and David are still working on Squeak and are also developing a completely object oriented, cross-platform, networked, collaborative environment which sounds very exciting. David's supposed to give me a demo tomorrow. [Joi Ito's Web]
My life has intersected Alan Kay quite a few times. One of the founders of MacroMind - Jamie Fenton - went to work for Alan in 1986 while he was doing the Vivarium project. Then they hired my ex-wife - Devorah (and the mother of my children Aryeh, Aron and Jacob) - to teach VideoWorks to the kids of the Vivarium project. Each kid had a Mac and the teachers took the software off the 'servers' (really just shared 5M hard drives) - as the kids made them look bad by knowing more than they did.
Anyway Jamie (who used to be known as Jay) programmed VideoWorks, MusicWorks, the concept of a multimedia player, designed and built Gorf and wrote a Tiny BASIC at the same time little Billy Gates was down in Arizona doing the same. She's been working in this field of o-o, dyanmic, distributed, cross-plateform, networked, collaborative stuff - for almost as long as Alan.
Joi also tells us about Daiichi, my favorite restaurant in the whole wide world.
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The steaming suppon pot |
The okoge |
Mizuka and I make it a point to go whenever we are in Kyoto. Daiichi is a
suppon restaurant.
Suppon is a kind of soft-shelled snapping turtle. They only have one course which starts out with
suppon blood (optional), pieces of
suppon chilled, then the main course. The main course is suppon chopped up and stewed in a very heavy clay pot with sake and soy sauce. The chopped suppon is very gelatinous and tastes kind of like a cross between fish and chicken. You add hot sake to the amazing soup and drink it in a cup. The pot is a special pot that requires extremely high temperatures to heat. These high temperatures can only be achieved using special coal which new restaurants are not approved to use. Once heated, the pot retains the boiling hot temperature for the duration of the course. They use
sake instead of water and this sake is essential. During the war and in post-war Japan, sake was not available so you had to buy a bottle of
sake on the black market and bring it with you in order to be served. After the
suppon stew comes to
ozoni. The
ozoni is prepared by putting rice in the pot with the soup, breaking a few eggs and stirring. After the first servings are removed from the pot, there is a little left on the both. This heats and gets crispy and brown. This crispy rice/egg stuff is very good and is called
okoge. You have to be very careful when scraping the
okoge from the pot. The pot is fragile and VERY old. If you break a pot they get VERY mad. If you ever break two, you are banned from the restaurant. I think it must have something to do with the pot, but the
suppon at Daiichi is superior to any other
suppon I have ever had and it is consistently great. [
Joi Ito's Web]
I love attention to detail when it really matters.
