Alan Kay | Wikiwand

May 17, 1940 (age 78)

• Best known for his pioneering work on object-oriented programming and windowing graphical user interface design.
• Side note: "The Mother of All Demos" is a name retroactively applied to a landmark computer demonstration.
• "I had the fortune or misfortune to learn how to read fluently starting at the age of three. So I had read maybe 150 books by the time I hit 1st grade. And I already knew that the teachers were lying to me."
• Thereafter, Kay taught guitar in Denver, Colorado for a year.
• hastily enlisted in the United States Air Force when the local draft board inquired about his nonstudent status. Assigned as a computer programmer (a rare billet dominated by women due to the secretarial connotations of the field in the era) after passing an aptitude test, he devised an early cross-platform file transfer system.
• During his studies at CU, he wrote the music for an adaptation of The Hobbit and other campus theatricals.
• 1966, he began graduate school at the University of Utah College of Engineering. He earned an M.S. in electrical engineering in 1968 before taking his Ph.D. in computer science in 1969.
• His doctoral dissertation, FLEX: A Flexible Extendable Language, described the invention of a computer language known as FLEX.
• While at Utah, he worked with "father of computer graphics" Ivan Sutherland, best known for writing such pioneering programs as Sketchpad. This greatly inspired Kay's evolving views on objects and programming.
• In 1968, he met Seymour Papert and learned of the Logo programming language, a dialect of Lisp optimized for educational purposes.
• in 1969, Kay became a visiting researcher at the Stanford Artificial Intelligence Laboratory in anticipation of accepting a professorship at Carnegie Mellon University. Instead, in 1970, he joined the Xerox PARC research staff in Palo Alto, California. (where he developed object-oriented language concept)
• Throughout the decade, he developed prototypes of networked workstations using the programming language Smalltalk. These inventions were later commercialized by Apple in their Lisa and Macintosh computers.
• While at PARC, Kay conceived the Dynabook concept, a key progenitor of laptop and tablet computers and the e-book.
• He is also the architect of the modern overlapping windowing graphical user interface (GUI).
• Kay is considered to be one of the first researchers into mobile learning; many features of the Dynabook concept have been adopted in the design of the One Laptop Per Child educational platform, with which Kay is actively involved.
• Kay: educational communities, parents, and children will not see in it a set of tools invented by Douglas Engelbart, but a medium in the Marshall McLuhan sense.
• Not a personal dynamic vehicle, but a personal dynamic medium - With a vehicle one could wait until high school and give “drivers ed”, but if it was a medium, it had to extend into the world of childhood.
• From 1981 to 1984, Kay was Atari's Chief Scientist. He became an Apple Fellow in 1984.