Alan Curtis Kay is a computer scientist, best known for his work on object-oriented programming, windowing graphical user interface design and the Dynabook.

Life

Kay was born on May 17, 1940 in Springfield, Massachusetts. He earned a Bachelor's degree in Mathematics and Molecular Biology, working in the meantime as a professional jazz guitarist. After that he graduated from University of Utah College of Engineering, earning a Master's degree and a Ph.D. degree.

In 1970 Kay was hired by Xerox Corporation's Palo Alto Research Center, PARC to run the Learning Research Group. During the 1970s Alan Kay with other researcher created Smalltalk to support the "human–computer symbiosis", believing in the constructivist theory. He is one of the fathers of object-oriented programming, the idea of laptop and tablet with the concept of Dynabook, which was conceived as an educational platform.

In 1980 he left Xerox PARC and moved to Los Angeles, where he worked for Atari before joining Apple. He stayed there until the closing of the Advanced Technology Group, then he joined Walt Disney Imagineering until Disney ended its Disney Fellow program.
After these experience he founded Viewpoints Research Institute, a non-profit organization built for learning and advanced software development.

He later became a Senior Fellow at Hewlett-Packard until HP disbanded the Advanced Software Research Team.
He also had teaching experiences at TED and in 2011 he taught a Fall class at NYU.
Recently he is head of Viewpoints Institute.

Work

He developed SmallTalk, which was originally designed as a graphical programming language, but it rapidly became a complete integrated programming environment with a debugger, an object-oriented virtual memory, an editor, a screen management and a user interface. SmallTalk was the first dynamic object-oriented programming language and it ran on the Alto computer.
Alan Kay about SmallTalk:

Smalltalk's design and existence is due to the insight that everything we can describe can be represented by the recursive composition of a single kind of behavioral building block that hides its combination of state and process inside itself and can be dealt with only through the exchange of messages.

He also developed Squeak, an open source dialect of SmallTalk, with which developed Etoys that is a child-friendly computer environment and object-oriented prototype-based programming language for educational purpose.
More recently he began along other researcher the Croquet Project, which is a software development kit for use in developing collaborative virtual world applications.

During his work at Xeroc PARC he instituted the following goals:

1. Provide examples of how small computers could be used in different areas;
2. Analyse how small computers could help to improve the user's visual and auditory skills;
3. Let children spend time learning about computers and experiment with personal ways to understand computer processes;
4. Report on children's unexpected uses of the computer and its software.

He was a pioneer in the development of tools that transformed computer into a metamedium , including all other kind of media. He usually said:

The best way to predict the future is to invent it.

Awards

In 2003 he was awarded with the Alan. M. Turing Award from the Association of Computing Machinery for pioneering many of the ideas at the root of contemporary object-oriented programming languages, leading the team that developed Smalltalk, and for fundamental contributions to personal computing" the Kyoto Prize from the Inamori Foundation "for creation of the concept of modern personal computing and contribution to its realization.

Among the other, in 2001 UdK 01-Award in Berlin, Germany for pioneering the GUI , the J-D Warnier Prix D'Informatique and NEC C&C Prize. In 2004 he received the Kyoto Price.