alan kay for other people named alan kay see alan kay disambiguation alan curtis kay born may 17 1940 he is best known for his pioneering work on objectoriented programming and windowing graphical user interface design he is the president of the viewpoints research institute and an adjunct professor of computer science at the university of california los angeles he is also on the advisory board of ttivanguard until mid2005 he was a senior fellow at hp labs a visiting professor at kyoto university and an adjunct professor at the massachusetts institute of technology mit kay is also a former professional jazz guitarist composer and theatrical designer and an amateur classical pipe organist early life and work in an interview on education in america with the davis group ltd kay said 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 originally from springfield massachusetts kays family relocated several times due to his fathers career in physiology before ultimately settling in the new york metropolitan area when he was nine he attended the prestigious brooklyn technical high school where he was suspended due to insubordination in his senior year having already accumulated enough credits to graduate kay then attended bethany college in bethany west virginia he majored in biology and minored in mathematics before he was asked to leave by the administration for protesting the institutions jewish quota thereafter kay taught guitar in denver colorado for a year and 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 crossplatform file transfer system following his discharge kay enrolled at the university of colorado boulder earning a bachelors degree in mathematics and molecular biology in 1966 before and during this time he worked as a professional jazz guitarist during his studies at cu he wrote the music for an adaptation of the hobbit and other campus theatricals in the autumn of 1966 he began graduate school at the university of utah college of engineering he earned an ms in electrical engineering in 1968 before taking his phd 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 kays evolving views on objects and programming as he grew busier with arpa research he ended his musical career in 1968 he met seymour papert and learned of the logo programming language 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 leaving utah as an associate professor of computer science 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 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 kay is one of the fathers of the idea of objectoriented programming which he named along with some colleagues at parc some of the original objectoriented concepts including the use of the words object and class had been developed for simula 67 at the norwegian computing center later he said im 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 ebook he is also the architect of the modern overlapping windowing graphical user interface gui because the dynabook was conceived as an educational platform 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 the field of computing is awaiting new revolution to happen according to kay in which 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 he wrote as with simulas leading to oop this encounter finally hit me with what the destiny of personal computing really was going to be not a personal dynamic vehicle as in engelbarts metaphor opposed to the ibm railroads but something much more profound 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 recent work and recognition from 1981 to 1984 kay was ataris chief scientist he became an apple fellow in 1984 following the closure of the companys 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 he founded viewpoints research institute a nonprofit organization dedicated to children learning and advanced software development for its first ten years kay and his viewpoints group were based at applied minds in glendale california where he and ferren continued to work together on various projects kay was also a senior fellow at hewlettpackard until hp disbanded the advanced software research team on july 20 2005 kay taught a fall 2011 class powerful ideas useful tools to understand the world at new york universitys interactive telecommunications program itp along with fulltime itp faculty member nancy hechinger the goal of the class was to devise new forms of teachinglearning based on fundamental powerful concepts rather than traditional rote learning squeak etoys and croquet in december 1995 while still at apple kay collaborated with many others to start the open source squeak version of smalltalk and he continues to work on it as part of this effort in november 1996 his team began research on what became the etoys system more recently he started along with david a smith david p reed andreas raab rick mcgeer julian lombardi and mark mccahill the croquet project an open source networked 2d and 3d environment for collaborative work tweak 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 was a researcher working in kays group then at hewlettpackard he proposed defining a script process and providing a default scheduling mechanism that avoids several more general problems its underlying object system is classbased but to users during programming it acts like it is prototypebased tweak objects are created and run in tweak project windows childrens machine in november 2005 at the world summit on the information society the mit research laboratories unveiled a new laptop computer for educational use around the world it has many names the 100 laptop the one laptop per child program the childrens machine and the xo1 the program was begun and is sustained by kays friend nicholas negroponte and is based on kays dynabook ideal kay is a prominent codeveloper of the computer focusing on its educational software using squeak and etoys reinventing programming 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 lectures at oopsla 1997 conference and his acm turing award talk entitled the computer revolution hasnt happened yet were informed by his experiences with sketchpad simula smalltalk and the bloated code of commercial software on august 31 2006 kays proposal to the united states national science foundation nsf was granted thus 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 selfexploratorium awards and honors alan kay has received many awards and honors among them 2001 udk 01award in berlin germany for pioneering the gui jd warnier prix dinformatique nec cc prize 2002 telluride tech festival award of technology in telluride colorado 2003 acm turing award for pioneering many of the ideas at the root of contemporary objectoriented programming languages leading the team that developed smalltalk and for fundamental contributions to personal computing 2004 kyoto prize charles stark draper prize with butler w lampson robert w taylor and charles p thacker 2012 upe abacus award awarded to individuals who have provided extensive support and leadership for studentrelated activities in the computing and information disciplines honorary doctorates 2002 kungliga tekniska hgskolan royal institute of technology in stockholm 2005 georgia institute of technology 2005 columbia college chicago awarded doctor of humane letters honoris causa 2007 laurea honoris causa in informatica universit di pisa italy 2008 university of waterloo 2010 universidad de murcia 2017 university of edinburgh honorary professor berlin university of the arts elected fellow of american academy of arts and sciences national academy of engineering royal society of arts 1999 computer history museum for his fundamental contributions to personal computing and humancomputer interface development 2008 association for computing machinery for fundamental contributions to personal computing and objectoriented programming 2011 hasso plattner institute his other honors include the jd warnier prix dinformatique 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 list of pioneers in computer science alan kayat wikipedias sister projects media from wikimedia commons news from wikinews quotations from wikiquote textbooks from wikibooks viewpoints research institute alan kay at ted vtesmalltalk programming languageimplementationsmajor amber dolphin smalltalk gemstones gnu smalltalk pharo smalltalkx squeak visualage smalltalk visualworks dialects fscript little smalltalk newspeak pocket smalltalk self steptalk strongtalk software aidaweb croquet gemstones open cobalt seaside communitypeople lars bak gilad bracha l peter deutsch adele goldberg urs hlzle dan ingalls ted kaehler alan kay diana merry scott wallace developers gemstone cincom systems ibm object arts xerox parc category vtea m turing award laureates1960s alan perlis 1966 maurice vincent wilkes 1967 richard hamming 1968 marvin minsky 1969 1970s james h wilkinson 1970 john mccarthy 1971 edsger w dijkstra 1972 charles bachman 1973 donald knuth 1974 allen newell herbert a simon 1975 michael o rabin dana scott 1976 john backus 1977 robert w floyd 1978 kenneth e iverson 1979 1980s tony hoare 1980 edgar f codd 1981 stephen cook 1982 ken thompson dennis ritchie 1983 niklaus wirth 1984 richard karp 1985 john hopcroft robert tarjan 1986 john cocke 1987 ivan sutherland 1988 william kahan 1989 1990s fernando j corbat 1990 robin milner 1991 butler lampson 1992 juris hartmanis richard e stearns 1993 edward feigenbaum raj reddy 1994 manuel blum 1995 amir pnueli 1996 douglas engelbart 1997 jim gray 1998 fred brooks 1999 2000s andrew yao 2000 olejohan dahl kristen nygaard 2001 ron rivest adi shamir leonard adleman 2002 alan kay 2003 vint cerf bob kahn 2004 peter naur 2005 frances e allen 2006 edmund m clarke e allen emerson joseph sifakis 2007 barbara liskov 2008 charles p thacker 2009 2010s leslie g valiant 2010 judea pearl 2011 shafi goldwasser silvio micali 2012 leslie lamport 2013 michael stonebraker 2014 martin hellman whitfield diffie 2015 tim bernerslee 2016 john l hennessy david patterson 2017 vtesoftware engineeringfields computer programming requirements engineering software deployment software design software maintenance software testing systems analysis formal methods concepts data modeling enterprise architecture functional specification modeling language orthogonality programming paradigm software software archaeology software architecture software configuration management software development methodology software development process software quality software quality assurance software verification and validation structured analysis orientations agile aspectoriented object orientation ontology service orientation sdlc modelsdevelopmental agile eup executable uml incremental model iterative model prototype model rad up scrum spiral model vmodel waterfall model xp other spice cmmi data model er model function model information model metamodeling object model systems model view model languages idef uml usl sysml softwareengineers victor basili kent beck grady booch fred brooks barry boehm peter chen danese cooper ward cunningham tom demarco edsger w dijkstra delores m etter martin fowler adele goldstine margaret hamilton c a r hoare lois haibt mary jean harrold grace hopper watts humphrey michael a jackson ivar jacobson alan kay nancy leveson stephen j mellor bertrand meyer david parnas trygve reenskaug winston w royce james rumbaugh mary shaw peri tarr elaine weyuker niklaus wirth edward yourdon related fields computer science computer engineering project management risk management systems engineering category commons authority control worldcat identities acm dl 81100544599 dblp kalanckay gnd 133744663 isni 0000 0000 8310 2205 lccn no2007124396 mgp 23344 ndl 00469334 snac w6jb0d5f viaf 112565461 