Alan Kay

Alan Curtis Kay ( born May 17, 1940 in Springfield, Massachusetts ) is an American computer scientist who is known for his pioneering work on object-oriented programming Smalltalk -80, Squeak and the design of user interfaces. He was himself so for example for the embossed by him winged words: "The best way to predict the future is to invent it. " ( The best way to predict the future is to invent it. )

Until 2005 he was a Senior Fellow at the Hewlett -Packard laboratories, lecturer at the University of California, Los Angeles, visiting professor at Kyoto University and lecturer at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. He is also the director of the Viewpoints Research Institute.

  • 2.1 Squeak and Croquet
  • 2.2 100 dollar laptop

Life

Alan Curtis Kay earned a bachelor's degree in mathematics and molecular biology at the University of Colorado at Boulder and a master's degree from the University of Utah. In Utah, he worked in the 1960s with Ivan Sutherland at the first graphical applications such as Sketchpad. At the same time he taught professional jazz guitar.

In 1970 he took a job at Xerox Palo Alto Research Center, Xerox PARC, at. In the 1970s, he was there one of the key members in the development of network workstations, which he developed with the Smalltalk programming language. Later Apple commercialized these inventions into products. After ten years at Xerox PARC, he was chief scientist at Atari for three years.

Kay is married to the writer, producer and actress Bonnie MacBird.

Younger employments

Since 1984, he worked at Apple, Steve Jobs to 1997 where he graduated as the Advanced Technology Group R & D group (research and development). He was then working at Walt Disney Imagineering, and remained there until the Affiliate Program ended. Then he moved to Applied Minds, where he was a Senior Partner at Hewlett -Packard, to this, the Advanced Software Research team disbanded on 20 July 2005. He is currently head of the Viewpoints Research Institute.

Services

Kay is one of the fathers of object-oriented programming, along with some colleagues in PARC. He invented the Dynabook concept, which formulated the basic idea of ​​the laptops and tablet computers, and he is seen as the architect of modern window-based graphical user interfaces.

Squeak and Croquet

Kay has worked with many others in the open source project Squeak, which was founded in December 1995. In the same context, he worked with David A. Smith, David P. Reed, Andreas Raab, Rick McGeer, Julian Lombardi and Mark McCahill has long been on Croquet that the basic ideas of Squeak, namely to adapt the computer to the physical environment, in a three-dimensional user interface incorporate liked.

100 dollar laptop

In November 2005, the World Summit on the Information Society, the Massachusetts Institute of Technology presented a 100 - dollar laptop, Alan Kay is currently working as a consultant for the project One Laptop per Child. His concept of an interactive, computer- and network- mediated interaction, the Dynabook, there is a component in software development for the student laptop. Based modules are installed by default on student laptops eToys, on Squeak.

Awards and Honors

  • In 2001 he received the University of the Arts 01 Award in Berlin for his services to graphical user interfaces; J- D Warnier Prix D' Informatique; NEC C & C Prize
  • 2002: Telluride Tech Festival Award of Technology in Telluride ( Colorado)
  • In 2003 he won the Turing Award for his work with object- oriented programming.
  • In 2004 he received the Kyoto Prize together with Jürgen Habermas, and the Charles Stark Draper Prize, along with Butler Lampson, Robert W. Taylor and Charles P. Thacker.
  • Honorary doctorates: 2002: Royal Institute of Technology Stockholm
  • 2005: Georgia Institute of Technology
  • 2005: Columbia College Chicago
  • 2007: Laurea Honoris Causa in Informatica, Università di Pisa, Italy
  • 2008: University of Waterloo
  • 2010: University of Murcia
Hewlett-Packard University of Colorado Boulder OLPC XO-1 Telluride (Colorado) Robert Taylor (computer scientist) Honorary title (academic) Alan Perlis Maurice Wilkes James H. Wilkinson John McCarthy (computer scientist) Charles Bachman Donald Knuth Allen Newell Herbert A. Simon Michael O. Rabin Kenneth E. Iverson Stephen Cook Niklaus Wirth Richard M. Karp John Cocke Manuel Blum Amir Pnueli Kristen Nygaard Ron Rivest Adi Shamir E. Allen Emerson Joseph Sifakis Judea Pearl Leslie Lamport Integrated Authority File
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