Alan Kay

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!"

External Links http://www.mprove.de/diplom/referencesKay - Detailed Alan Kay Bibliography http://www.newmediareader.com/excerpts - 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)