Alan Kay is a
computer scientist. who 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.
Personal quotes
- "The best way to predict the future is to invent it!"
http://www.mprove.de/diplom/referencesKay.html - Detailed Alan Kay Bibliography
http://www.newmediareader.com/excerpts.html - 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)