Alan Kay

Computing pioneer Alan Curtis Kay, creator of the "Smalltalk" programming language, was born in 1940 in Springfield, Massachusetts. Shortly after his birth, his family moved to Australia where they lived for a few years before moving permanently back to the United States. He learned to read by age three and gained an early appreciation for music, thanks to his mother, a musician. He would later work as a professional jazz guitarist, composer, and theatrical designer and become adept as a classical pipe organist. Kay attended Bethany College in West Virginia, but he was expelled in 1961 for protesting the Jewish quota there. He briefly turned to music, giving guitar lessons to support himself until he discovered his aptitude for computer programming. He was assigned to work on an IBM 1401 computer project for the U.S. Air Force. Later, he enrolled at the University of Colorado, where he completed his BS in Mathematics and Molecular Biology in 1966. He continued his studies at the University of Utah, where he received his MS and PhD degrees in Electrical Engineering. While a graduate student, he worked on the Utah Advanced Research Projects Agency (ARPA) project and developed one of the most important concepts of his career — the idea of dynamic object-oriented programming. After Kay left Xerox PARC in 1983, he was named a Chief Scientist at Atari, where he worked for three years. He was also a Fellow of Apple Computer for 12 years, from 1984 to 1997. He then served for five years as Vice President of Research and Development and Disney Fellow at The Walt Disney Company in Los Angeles. He is best known for the idea of personal computing, the concept of the intimate laptop computer, and the inventions of the now ubiquitous overlapping-window interface and modern object-oriented programming. His deep interest in children was the catalyst for these ideas, and it continues to inspire him. Kay was one of the founders of the Xerox Palo Alto Research Center (PARC), where he led one of the groups that in concert developed those ideas into modern workstations (and the forerunner of the Macintosh), the Smalltalk computer language, the overlapping-window interface, desktop publishing, the Ethernet, laser printing, and network "client servers". Kay has received many awards, including ACM's Softwware Systems Award and the J-D Warnier Prix D'Informatique. He is a Fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, the National Academy of Engineering, and the Royal Society of Arts.