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 laptop computer and 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.

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
• The complete text (with images) of Kay and Adele Goldberg's "Personal Dynamic Media" is available linked from this page (along with writings by Ted Nelson, Brenda Laurel, etc)