Kay, Alan

Kay, Alan

(1940–  ) American

Computer Scientist

Alan Kay developed a variety of innovative concepts that changed the way people use computers. Because he devised ways to have computers accommodate users’ perceptions and needs, Kay is thought by many to be the person most responsible for putting the “personal” in personal com-puters. Kay also made important contributions to object-oriented programming, changing the way programmers organized data and procedures in their work.

Kay’s father developed prostheses (artificial limbs) and his mother was an artist and musician. These varied per-spectives contributed to Kay’s interest in interaction with and perception of the environment. In the late 1960s, while completing work for his Ph.D. at the University of Utah, Kay developed his first innovations in both areas. He helped Ivan Sutherland with the development of a program called Sketchpad that enabled users to define and control onscreen objects, while also working on the development of Simula, a language that helped introduce new programming concepts (see Simula and object-oriented programming). Indeed, Kay coined the term object-oriented in the late 1960s. He viewed programs as consisting of objects that contained appropriate data that could be manipulated in response to “messages” sent from other objects. Rather than being rigid, top-down procedural structures, such programs were more like teams of cooperating workers. Kay also worked on parallel programming, where programs carried out several tasks simultaneously (see concurrent programming). He likened this structure to musical polyphony, where several melodies are sounded simultaneously.

Kay participated in the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA)—funded research that was lead-ing to the development of the Internet. One of these DARPA projects was FLEX, an attempt to build a computer that could be used by nonprogrammers through interacting with onscreen controls. While the bulky technology of the late 1960s made such machines impracticable, FLEX incorpo-rated some ideas that would be used in later PCs, including multiple onscreen windows.

During the 1970s, Kay worked at the innovative Xerox Palo Alto Research Center (PARC). Kay designed a laptop computer called the Dynabook, which featured high-reso-lution graphics and a graphical user interface. While the Dynabook was only a prototype, similar ideas would be used in the Alto, a desktop personal computer that could be controlled with a new pointing device, the mouse (see Engelbart, Douglas). A combination of high price and Xerox’s less than aggressive marketing kept the machine from being successful commercially, but Steven Jobs (see Jobs, Steven) would later use its interface concepts to design what would become the Macintosh.

On the programming side Kay developed Smalltalk, a language that was built from the ground up to be truly object-oriented (see Smalltalk). Kay’s work showed that there was a natural fit between object-oriented program-ming and an object-oriented user interface. For example, a button in a screen window could be represented by a button object in the program, and clicking on the screen button could send a message to the button program object, which would be programmed to respond in specific ways.

After leaving Xerox PARC in 1983, Kay briefly served as chief scientist at Atari and then moved to Apple, where he worked on Macintosh and other advanced projects. In 1996, Kay became a Disney Fellow and Vice President of Research and Development at Walt Disney Imagineering. In 2001 Kay founded Viewpoints Research Institute, a non-profit organization devoted to developing advanced learn-ing environments for children. One such project is Squeak, a streamlined but powerful version of Smalltalk that Kay started developing in 1995. Another, eToys, is a multiplat-form, media-rich, environment that can be used for educa-tion or “just” play. Behind it all is Kay’s continuing effort to do no less than reinvent programming and peoples’ rela-tionship to computer environments. Kay’s numerous honors include the ACM Turing Award (2003) for contributions to object-oriented programming and the Kyoto Prize (2004).