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Alan Kay | |
|---|---|
.jpg) Alan Kay holding the prototype of theDynabook | |
| Born | Alan Curtis Kay (1940-05-17)May 17, 1940 (age 85) |
| Education | University of Colorado, Boulder (BS) University of Utah (MS,PhD) |
| Known for | Dynabook Object-oriented programming Smalltalk Desktop metaphor Graphical user interface Windows |
| Spouse | Bonnie MacBird |
| Awards | ACMTuring Award (2003) Kyoto Prize Charles Stark Draper Prize |
| Scientific career | |
| Fields | Computer science |
| Institutions | Xerox PARC Stanford University Atari Inc. Apple Inc.ATG Walt Disney Imagineering UCLA Kyoto University MIT Viewpoints Research Institute Hewlett-PackardLabs |
| Thesis | FLEX: A Flexible Extendable Language (1968) |
| Doctoral advisors | David C. Evans Robert S. Barton |
| Notable students | David Canfield Smith |
Alan Curtis Kay (born May 17, 1940)[1] is an Americancomputer scientist who pioneered work onobject-oriented programming andwindowinggraphical user interface (GUI) design. AtXeroxPARC he led the design and development of the first modern windowedcomputer desktop interface. There he also led the development of the influentialobject-orientedprogramming languageSmalltalk, both personally designing most of the early versions of the language and coining the term "object-oriented."He has been elected a Fellow of theAmerican Academy of Arts and Sciences, theNational Academy of Engineering, and theRoyal Society of Arts.[2] He received theTuring Award in 2003.[3]
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.[4]
Originally fromSpringfield, Massachusetts, Kay's family relocated several times due to his father's career inphysiology before ultimately settling in theNew York metropolitan area.
He attendedBrooklyn Technical High School. Having accumulated enough credits to graduate, he then attendedBethany College inBethany, West Virginia, where he majored inbiology and minored in mathematics.
Kay then taught guitar inDenver, Colorado for a year. He was drafted into theUnited States Army, then qualified for officer training in theUnited States Air Force, where he became acomputer programmer after passing an aptitude test.
After his discharge, he enrolled at theUniversity of Colorado Boulder and earned a Bachelor of Science (B.S.) in mathematics andmolecular biology in 1966.
In the autumn of 1966, he began graduate school at theUniversity of Utah College of Engineering. He earned aMaster of Science inelectrical engineering in 1968, then aDoctor of Philosophy incomputer science in 1969. His doctoral dissertation,FLEX: A Flexible Extendable Language, described the invention of acomputer language namedFLEX.[5][6][7] While there, he worked with the "fathers ofcomputer graphics"David C. Evans (who had recently been recruited from theUniversity of California, Berkeley to start Utah's computer science department) andIvan Sutherland (best known for writing such pioneering programs asSketchpad). Kay credits Sutherland's 1963 thesis for influencing his views onobjects andcomputer programming. As he grew busier with research for theDefense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA), he ended his musical career.
In 1968, he metSeymour Papert and learned of the programming languageLogo, adialect ofLisp optimized for educational purposes. This led him to learn of the work ofJean Piaget,Jerome Bruner,Lev Vygotsky, and ofconstructionist learning, further influencing his professional orientation. On December 9 of that same year he was present in San Francisco for theMother of all Demos, a landmark computer demonstration byDouglas Engelbart. Even though he was sick with a high fever on that day, the event was very influential in Kay's career. He recalled later: "It was one of the greatest experiences in my life".[8]
In 1969, Kay became a visiting researcher at theStanford Artificial Intelligence Laboratory in anticipation of accepting a professorship atCarnegie Mellon University. Instead, in 1970, he joined theXeroxPARC research staff inPalo Alto, California. Through the decade, he developed prototypes of networked workstations using the programming languageSmalltalk.
Along with some colleagues at PARC, Kay is one of the fathers of the idea ofobject-oriented programming (OOP), which he named.[9] Some original object-oriented concepts, including the use of the words 'object' and 'class', had been developed forSimula 67 at theNorwegian 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".[10]
While at PARC, Kay conceived theDynabook concept, a key progenitor of laptop andtablet computers and thee-book. He is also the architect of the modern overlapping windowinggraphical user interface (GUI).[11] Because the Dynabook was conceived as an educational platform, he is considered one of the first researchers intomobile learning; many features of the Dynabook concept have been adopted in the design of theOne Laptop Per Child educational platform,[12] with which Kay was actively involved.
From 1981 to 1984, Kay was Chief Scientist atAtari. In 1984, he became an Apple Fellow. After the closure of theApple Advanced Technology Group in 1997,[13] he was recruited by his friendBran Ferren, head of research and development atDisney, to joinWalt Disney Imagineering as a Disney Fellow. He remained there until Ferren left to start Applied Minds Inc with ImagineerDanny 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 inGlendale, California, where he and Ferren worked on various projects. Kay served as president of the Institute until its closure in 2018.
In 2002 Kay joinedHP Labs as a senior fellow,[14] departing when HP disbanded the Advanced Software Research Team on July 20, 2005.[15]He has been an adjunct professor ofcomputer science at theUniversity of California, Los Angeles, a visiting professor atKyoto University, and an adjunct professor at theMassachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT). Kay served on the advisory board ofTTI/Vanguard.
In December 1995, while still at Apple, Kay collaborated with many others to start theopen sourceSqueak version ofSmalltalk. As part of this effort, in November 1996, his team began research on what became theEtoys system. More recently he started, withDavid A. Smith,David P. Reed,Andreas Raab, Rick McGeer,Julian Lombardi, andMark McCahill, theCroquet Project, an open-source networked 2D and 3D environment for collaborative work.
In 2001, it became clear that the Etoy architecture in Squeak had reached its limits in what the Morphic interface infrastructure could do.Andreas Raab, a researcher in Kay's group then at Hewlett-Packard, proposed defining a "script process" and providing a default scheduling mechanism that avoided several more general problems.[16] The result was a new user interface, proposed to replace the Squeak Morphic user interface.Tweak added mechanisms of islands, asynchronous messaging, players and costumes, language extensions, projects, and tile scripting.[17] Its underlying object system isclass-based, but to users (during programming) it acts as if it wereprototype-based. Tweak objects are created and run in Tweak project windows.
In November 2005, at theWorld Summit on the Information Society, the MIT research laboratories unveiled a new laptop computer for educational use around the world. It has many names, including the $100 Laptop, theOne Laptop per Child program, the Children's Machine, and theXO-1. The program was founded and is sustained by Kay's friendNicholas Negroponte, and is based on Kay'sDynabook ideal. Kay is a prominent co-developer of the computer, focusing on its educational software using Squeak and Etoys.
Kay has lectured extensively on the idea that the computer revolution is very new, and all of the good ideas have not been universally implemented. His lectures at the OOPSLA 1997 conference, and his ACM Turing Award talk, "The Computer Revolution Hasn't Happened Yet", were informed by his experiences withSketchpad,Simula,Smalltalk, and the bloated code of commercial software.
On August 31, 2006, Kay's proposal to the United StatesNational Science Foundation (NSF) was granted, funding Viewpoints Research Institute for several years. The proposal title was "STEPS Toward the Reinvention of Programming: A compact and Practical Model of Personal Computing as a Self-exploratorium".[18] STEPS is arecursive acronym that stands for "STEPS Toward Expressive Programming Systems". A sense of what Kay is trying to do comes from this quote, from the abstract of a seminar at Intel Research Labs, Berkeley: "The conglomeration of commercial and most open source software consumes in the neighborhood of several hundreds of millions of lines of code these days. We wonder: how small could be an understandable practical 'Model T' design that covers this functionality? 1M lines of code? 200K LOC? 100K LOC? 20K LOC?"[19]
Kay is a former professionaljazz guitarist, composer, and theatrical designer.
He also is an amateur classicalpipe organist.[20]
Kay is a grandson of author, illustrator, and photographerClifton Johnson, and a nephew of sailor, adventurer, and writerIrving Johnson.
Kay is married to the writer, actress, and producerBonnie MacBird.
Kay has received many awards and honors, including:
His other honors include the J-D Warnier Prix d'Informatique, the ACM Systems Software Award, the NEC Computers & Communication Foundation Prize, the Funai Foundation Prize, the Lewis Branscomb Technology Award, and the ACM SIGCSE Award for Outstanding Contributions to Computer Science Education.
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