Science & Tech Quote by Alan Kay

Kay’s line lands like a dare, but it’s really a diagnosis. “Serious about software” isn’t about grinding out more code; it’s about refusing the convenient fiction that software is pure thought, floating above the mess of physics, interfaces, and economic constraints. The barb is aimed at programmers who treat the machine as an invisible, neutral substrate. Kay insists the substrate is the message.

The subtext is control: if you didn’t shape the hardware, you’ve inherited someone else’s assumptions about memory, input, display, timing, and cost. Those assumptions quietly script what your software can be. A language, an operating system, even a “simple” app becomes a negotiation with hidden decisions made by chip designers and product managers. “Make their own hardware” is shorthand for collapsing that distance so the designer owns the whole stack and can rethink it, not just optimize within it.

Context matters: Kay comes out of the Xerox PARC era, when building new computing paradigms meant inventing the conditions for them. The Alto wasn’t just a box running code; it was a thesis about personal computing, graphics, and interaction rendered in circuitry. Later, the same ethos shows up in teams that define platforms end-to-end: early Apple, game consoles, modern ML accelerators. They don’t just ship faster products; they carve new creative territory by changing the rules.

The provocation still bites because today’s abstractions are even thicker. Cloud services and commodity devices make it easy to forget that every “software problem” is ultimately a hardware budget wearing a different outfit. Kay’s point: if you want to invent the future, stop renting the present.