BusinessWeek Senior Writer Steve Hamm's new book, The Race for Perfect: Inside the Quest to Design the Ultimate Portable Computer, chronicles the four-decade history of mobile computing. This graphic adaptation explores the role of Alan Kay, whose ideas shaped the development of today’s laptops, handhelds, and smartphones.

From the archive, some bits of Kay:

If the children are being instructed in the pink plane, can we teach them to think in the blue plane and live in a pink-plane society?

Alan Kay is one of the most influential computer scientists of the modern era. His contributions, among many others, include the concept of the personal computer. We sat down with him to discuss his take on how innovations happen.

"Thinking" is a higher category than "just" math, science, and the arts. It represents a synthesis of intuitive and analytical approaches to understanding the world and dealing with it.

A bicycle for the mind, redux.

"I didn't know it was hard."