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Via Boing-Boing, Business week has just put a comic strip on their web site, which tells the story of how Alan Kay, inspired by a visit to Seymour Papert seeded the idea of portable computers.

Long term readers of this blog no doubt know that I hold Alan Kay in high regard. I got to meet him several times, first I think at an internal IBM conference on Object Oriented Programming in the mid 1980s, Another time was at a Digitalk developers conference, where I obtained a prize possession. At the time I was the IBM technical liaison with Digitalk. They released a new version of Smalltalk/V PM at this particular conference, and I was presented a copy of the supplemental manual for the release signed by all of the Digitalk developers, and also by Alan Kay, who wrote something like “to the most non-IBM like IBMer I’ve ever met.”

Reading the business week strip, I was reminded of an even earlier personal connection with Kay and Smalltalk. A year or so before I really got into Objects, I was working on IBM Mainframe software in Poughkeepsie, NY. One summer the project got an intern, named Radia Perlman, who was in graduate school at M.I.T. And is now know as the “mother of the internet” for her invention of spanning-tree protocol. It was only later that I learned that she was one of Papert’s students working on Logo and seeing how kids learned programming with Logo, and if I recall correctly she also visited Xerox PARC, and was involved in porting the concept of the Logo turtle model of graphics to Smalltalk, where it became the Pen object.

What a long strange trip it is!