Alan Kay

Verified Timeline

Lore & Background

Alan Kay was born in Springfield, Massachusetts, and his family relocated several times due to his father's career in physiology before settling in the New York metropolitan area. He attended Brooklyn Technical High School, then Bethany College majoring in biology and minoring in mathematics. After teaching guitar in Denver for a year, he was drafted into the U.S. Army, then qualified for officer training in the U.S. Air Force, where he became a computer programmer after passing an aptitude test. Following his discharge, he earned a B.S. in mathematics and molecular biology from the University of Colorado Boulder in 1966, then an M.S. in electrical engineering in 1968 and a Ph.D. in computer science in 1969 from the University of Utah. His doctoral dissertation, "FLEX: A Flexible Extendable Language," described the invention of a computer language named FLEX. At Utah, he worked with David C. Evans and Ivan Sutherland, whose 1963 thesis on Sketchpad influenced Kay's views on objects and computer programming. In 1968, Kay met Seymour Papert and learned of the programming language Logo, a dialect of Lisp optimized for educational purposes. This led him to study the work of Jean Piaget, Jerome Bruner, Lev Vygotsky, and constructionist learning. On December 9, 1968, he attended the Mother of All Demos by Douglas Engelbart in San Francisco, an event he called "one of the greatest experiences in my life" despite being sick with a high fever. In 1970, he joined Xerox PARC, where he developed prototypes of networked workstations using Smalltalk and conceived the Dynabook concept, a key progenitor of laptop and tablet computers and the e-book. He is considered one of the first researchers into mobile learning. Later, he served as Chief Scientist at Atari from 1981 to 1984, became an Apple Fellow in 1984, and joined Walt Disney Imagineering as a Disney Fellow. In 2001, he founded Viewpoints Research Institute, a nonprofit organization dedicated to children, learning, and advanced software development.

Reader's Guide

Alan Kay's significance lies in his foundational contributions to modern computing, particularly object-oriented programming and graphical user interfaces. At Xerox PARC, he led the creation of Smalltalk, the first modern object-oriented language, and coined the term "object-oriented." He also led the design of the first modern windowed computer desktop interface. His Dynabook concept anticipated laptops, tablets, and e-books, and his focus on education shaped the One Laptop Per Child initiative, with which he was actively involved. Kay emphasized the importance of "messaging" over objects, saying: "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'." He received the Turing Award in 2003 "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." His later projects, including the open source Squeak version of Smalltalk (started December 1995), the Etoys system, and the Croquet Project, continued to explore educational computing and collaborative environments. Kay's lectures, such as his ACM Turing Award talk "The Computer Revolution Hasn't Happened Yet," argued that many good ideas remain unimplemented, and his STEPS project sought to radically reduce the complexity of personal computing software, asking: "how small could be an understandable practical 'Model T' design that covers this functionality? 1M lines of code? 200K LOC? 100K LOC? 20K LOC?"

Did You Know?

• Alan Kay learned to read fluently starting at about age three and had read maybe 150 books by the time he hit first grade.
• He was a professional jazz guitarist and composer before becoming a computer scientist.
• Kay attended the Mother of All Demos by Douglas Engelbart on December 9, 1968, despite being sick with a high fever, and called it 'one of the greatest experiences in my life'.
• He is a grandson of author, illustrator, and photographer Clifton Johnson, and a nephew of sailor and adventurer Irving Johnson.
• Kay's doctoral dissertation at the University of Utah described the invention of a computer language named FLEX.