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You can d/l [Ivan Sutherland's Sketchpad] thesis from the MIT library for $6 -- it's comparable to Newton's acheivements.
Yeah, right. He must be referring to Newton's lesser known athletic achievements.
Next we'll be comparing Larry Wall to Aristotle, and Linux to the New Testament.
John McCarthy invented PDP1 interactive LISP -- a metainvention, the Maxwell's Equations of programming.
Or McCarthy to Maxwell.
This stuff is better than anything in our handhelds today. We could implement it from they papers they wrote then, but no one reads the papers that were written in the 60s.
And apparently Kay doesn't read papers written before the 60's, such as, for example, Church or Russell.
Java can't add code to itself while running -- LISP could do this 40 years ago.
Largely irrelevant. LISP embarks an interpreter in every runtime and has a trapdoor and a special syntax so you can feed it abstract syntax. It doesn't solve the essential problems of reflection which have to do with binding, environments and generating syntactically correct (and, in an ST system, typeable) programs. In Java you can get exactly the same effect by calling an interpreter dynamically.
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Alan Kay's talk at O'Reilly Emerging Technology Conference 2003