Alan Curtis was a singer. Kay is an American computer scientist who is best known for being one of the first people to work on object-oriented programming and windowing graphical user interface design. In the late 1960s, he came up with the idea of dynamic object-oriented programming at the University of Utah’s ARPA project. “The best way to predict the future is to make it,” was his motto at Xerox PARC. One of his brilliant ideas was the Dynabook, a powerful and portable electronic device about the size of a three-ring notebook with a touch-sensitive liquid crystal screen and a keyboard for entering information. The early ideas behind laptops, notebook computers, and tablets can be traced back to the Dynabook. The new computer medium needed a way for people to interact with it. Kay and the other people in his lab made graphical interfaces and the programming language Smalltalk to help with this. Some people call him the “father of personal computers” because he had the idea for a small computer system in the 1970s, a long time before notebook computers came out. He started and is the president of the non-profit Viewpoints Research Institute, which works on the One Laptop Per Child project and helps children. He has done a lot of work on the Squeak project and is part of the Etoys System research.
Early years and childhood
Alan Curtis Kay was born in Massachusetts, in the city of Springfield. His father made artificial arms and legs, and his mother played music. Before he went to school, he had read about 150 books.
He got his Bachelor’s degree in Mathematics and Molecular Biology from the University of Colorado at Boulder. He made a living as a jazz guitarist before and during this time.
In 1966, he went to graduate school at the University of Utah College of Engineering and got a Master’s degree and a Ph.D. He worked there with Ivan Sutherland, who was one of the first people to make graphics programs like Sketchpad.
Alan Kay’s Career
In 1968, Kay met Seymour Papert and learned about the Logo programming language, which is a version of Lisp. He made Logo as a way to help kids learn how to think and solve problems better.
He looked at the ideas of Jean Piaget, Jerome Bruner, Lev Vygotsky, and constructionist learning, which says that each learner builds a mental model of the world to help them understand it.
In 1970, he joined Xerox Corporation’s Palo Alto Research Center (PARC), where he was one of the key people who helped make prototypes of networked workstations using the programming language Smalltalk for constructive learning.
He and other people at PARC and the Norwegian Computing Center were the first to come up with the idea of object-oriented programming (OOP). OOP is used in C++, Objective-C, Smalltalk, Java, C#, Perl, Python, Ruby, and PHP.
In a way that was similar to his Dynabook idea, he worked on the One Laptop per Child project, which tries to make cheap educational tools for people in the developing world.
In 1984, he became an Apple Fellow at Apple Computer’s ATG (Advanced Technology Group), which did research on both hardware and software in areas like Human-Computer Interaction, Educational Technology, and Language/Action Perspective.
He was a Disney Fellow at Walt Disney Imagineering from 1996 to 2001. The goal of the Disney Fellows program was to get people to work on technology that could be used in creative arts, media, and entertainment.
In 2001, he started the Viewpoints Research Institute (VPRI), a non-profit group that works to give children around the world a better education in “powerful ideas” and to improve systems research and personal computing.
Kay worked on a team at Applied Minds, a company started in 2000 by ex-Disney Imagineers that helps other companies with technology, design, research and development, and consulting. The main office of the company is in Glendale, California.
He worked at Hewlett-Packard as a Senior Fellow until 2005, when HP got rid of the Advanced Software Research Team, a move that was criticized outside of HP and led to mistrust within the company.
At the World Summit on the Information Society in 2005, the MIT research labs showed off a new laptop computer based on his Dynabook idea. It was called the $100 Laptop, the Children’s Machine, and the XO-1.
In 2006, the United States National Science Foundation (NSF) accepted his proposal, which was called “STEPS Toward the Reinvention of Programming: A Compact and Practical Model of Personal Computing, as a Self-exploratorium.” Funds were also approved.
In 2011, he taught a class at NYU’s Interactive Telecommunications Program called “Powerful Ideas: Useful Tools to Understand the World.” The goal of the class was to come up with new ways to teach and learn based on fundamental, powerful ideas instead of traditional memorization.
Works of note
Kay came up with the idea for the Dynabook in 1972. This was the first step toward laptops, tablets, and E-books. So, he is the person who came up with the modern graphical user interface (GUI) with overlapping windows and mobile learning.
Kay is a very important part of the Squeak project, and she is also working on the Etoys System, which is a Squeak-based educational program that is kid-friendly and can be used in schools.
Awards & Achievements
Kay got the ACM Turing Award in 2003 for coming up with many of the ideas that are still used in modern object-oriented programming languages, leading the team that made Smalltalk, and making important contributions to personal computing.
In 2004, he won the Kyoto Prize, which is a lot like the Nobel Prize. He also shared the Charles Stark Draper Prize for Alto, which was the first networked computer that worked well.
Personal History and Legacies
Alan Kay married Bonnie Lynn MacBird in 1983. She is an actress, playwright, screenwriter, and producer. She is best known for co-writing the science fiction movie “Tron,” for which she won two Emmys.
Estimated Net worth
Alan is one of the wealthiest computer scientists and is on the list of the most well-known computer scientists. Based on what we found on Wikipedia, Forbes, and Business Insider, Alan Kay has a net worth of about $1.5 million.
Trivia
“If you don’t fail at least 90% of the time, you’re not aiming high enough,” said this American computer scientist who was ahead of his time.
Alan is the main character in the movie “Tron,” and he fights against the command-line-based Master Control Program. This was meant to be a metaphor for this computer scientist’s life.