Alan Kay
Alan Kay is an American computer scientist. He joined Xerox Corporation's Palo Alto Research Center (PARC) in 1970. In the seventies he was one of the key members there to develop prototypes of networked workstations using the programming language Smalltalk. These inventions were later commercialized by Apple with the Apple Macintosh. Alan Kay is one of the fathers of the idea of object-oriented programming. He is the conceiver of the Dynabook concept which defined the basics of the laptop computer and the tablet computer and he is also considered by some as the architect of the modern windowing GUI.After 10 years at Xerox PARC, Kay was Atari's chief scientist for three years. Starting in 1984, Kay was a Fellow at Apple Computer. He then joined Walt Disney Imagineering as a Disney Fellow. A recent development is the open source Squeak dynamic media software.
In 2003 Alan Kay received the Turing Award (often refered to as the "Nobel Prize of Computer Science") for his work on object oriented programming.
Kay has a Bachelor's degree in Mathematics and Molecular Biology from the University of Colorado, and a Master's degree and Ph.D. from the University of Utah.
Personal quotes
- "The best way to predict the future is to invent it!"
External Links
- Detailed Alan Kay Bibliography
- Personal Dynamic Media by Alan Kay and Adele Goldberg