[david927]

Not that funny -- it was Alan's dissertation, a quite serious work, and it was done in... 1968!

In fact, you could say it was his push for the Dynabook that helped usher in the personal computer as well as WYSIWYG, etc.

[seanmcdirmid]

When Alan Kay started grad school at Utah, he was handed a bunch of papers on SketchPad, which was done in 1963 :) So the dominoes started falling...SketchPad inspires both Smalltalk and GUI computing.

[aaronblohowiak]

Do you know of any modern attempts at SketchPad?

[lukego]

There is a Squeak-based faithful recreation of Sketchpad at around 12:30 in Alan Kay's talk here: http://amturing.acm.org/acm_tcc_webcasts.cfm.