Alan Kay

Alan Curtis Kay (born May 17, 1940) is an American computer scientist best known for his pioneering work on object-oriented programming and windowing graphical user interface (GUI) design.

At Xerox PARC he led the design and development of the first modern windowed computer desktop interface.

There he also led the development of the influential object-oriented programming language Smalltalk, both personally designing most of the early versions of the language and coining the term "object-oriented."

He has been elected a Fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, the National Academy of Engineering, and the Royal Society of Arts.

Kay credits Sutherland's 1963 thesis for influencing his views on objects and computer programming.

As he grew busier with research for the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA), he ended his musical career.

After his discharge, he enrolled at the University of Colorado Boulder and earned a Bachelor of Science (B.S.) in mathematics and molecular biology in 1966.

In the autumn of 1966, he began graduate school at the University of Utah College of Engineering.

He earned a Master of Science in electrical engineering in 1968, then a Doctor of Philosophy in computer science in 1969.

His doctoral dissertation, FLEX: A Flexible Extendable Language, described the invention of a computer language named FLEX.

While there, he worked with "fathers of computer graphics" David C. Evans (who had recently been recruited from the University of California, Berkeley to start Utah's computer science department) and Ivan Sutherland (best known for writing such pioneering programs as Sketchpad).

In 1968, he met Seymour Papert and learned of the programming language Logo, a dialect of Lisp optimized for educational purposes.

This led him to learn of the work of Jean Piaget, Jerome Bruner, Lev Vygotsky, and of constructionist learning, further influencing his professional orientation.

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.

Through the decade, he developed prototypes of networked workstations using the programming language Smalltalk.

Along with some colleagues at PARC, Kay is one of the fathers of the idea of object-oriented programming (OOP), which he named.

Some original object-oriented concepts, including the use of the words 'object' and 'class', had been developed for Simula 67 at the Norwegian Computing Center.

Kay said:

"I'm sorry that I long ago coined the term 'objects' for this topic because it gets many people to focus on the lesser idea. The big idea is 'messaging'."

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).

Because the Dynabook was conceived as an educational platform, he is considered 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.

From 1981 to 1984, Kay was Chief Scientist at Atari.

In 1984, he became an Apple Fellow.

After the closure of the Apple Advanced Technology Group in 1997, he was recruited by his friend Bran Ferren, head of research and development at Disney, to join Walt Disney Imagineering as a Disney Fellow.

He remained there until Ferren left to start Applied Minds Inc with Imagineer Danny Hillis, leading to the cessation of the Fellows program.

In 2001, Kay founded Viewpoints Research Institute, a nonprofit organization dedicated to children, learning, and advanced software development.

For their first ten years, Kay and his Viewpoints group were based at Applied Minds in Glendale, California, where he and Ferren worked on various projects.

He received the Turing award in 2003.

Kay is also a former professional jazz guitarist, composer, and theatrical designer.

He also is an amateur classical pipe organist.

In an interview on education in America with the Davis Group Ltd., Kay said:

"I had the misfortune or the fortune to learn how to read fluently starting about the age of three, so I had read maybe 150 books by the time I hit first grade, and I already knew the teachers were lying to me."

Originally from Springfield, Massachusetts, Kay's family relocated several times due to his father's career in physiology before ultimately settling in the New York metropolitan area.

He attended Brooklyn Technical High School.

Having accumulated enough credits to graduate, he then attended Bethany College in Bethany, West Virginia, where he majored in biology and minored in mathematics.

Kay then taught guitar in Denver, Colorado for a year.

He was drafted in the United States Army, then qualified for officer training in the United States Air Force, where he became a computer programmer after passing an aptitude test.

Kay served as president of the Institute until its closure in 2018.