(Photo Source: http://www.research.apple.com/people/features/kay.gif)
(Photo Source: http://www.research.apple.com/people/features/kay.gif)
Alan Kay, born Springfield, MA, May 17th 1940; Kay is one of the inventors of the Smalltalk programming language and 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.
--Alan Kay
Education
B.S., Mathematics and Molecular Biology, University of Colorado, 1966;
M.S., Electrical Engineering, University of Utah; 1968
Ph.D., Computer Science, University of Utah, 1969;
Professional Experience
Researcher, Stanford Artificial Intelligence Laboratory, 1969-71;
Group Leader, Principal Scientist, Xerox Fellow, Xerox Palo Alto Research Center, 1971-1981
Chief Scientist, Atari, 1981-1984
Apple Fellow, Apple Computer, 1984-1996
Disney Fellow, TWDC, 1996-2001
President, Viewpoints Research Institute, 2001-present
HP Senior Fellow, HP, 2003-2005
Although Kay was born in Springfield, Massachusetts his family moved to Australia where he lived for the first few years of his life. However, the threat of Japanese invasion during World War II prompted his parents to return to the United States. The gifted youth learned to read by the age of three and was continually pushing his mind and expanding his knowledge as he grew older.(1)
"By the time I got to school, I had already read a couple hundred books. I knew in the first grade that they were lying to me because I had already been exposed to other points of view. School is basically about one point of view -- the one the teacher has or the textbooks have. They don't like the idea of having different points of view, so it was a battle. Of course I would pipe up with my five-year-old voice."(1)
Kay was also exposed to music since his early childhood; his mother was both a musician and an artist. He was a soprano soloist in his grade school choir and a proficient guitar player as a teenager. Indeed, he was a professional jazz guitarist from 1957-1967.(4)
When, in 1961, he was expelled from Bethany College in West Virginia for protesting, he relied on his musical talents to make a living in Denver playing jazz clubs and giving guitar lessons. But he found another latent talent when he joined the Air Force and performed well on a computed programming aptitude test. He was sent to work on an IBM 1401 by the U.S. Air Force.(1)
When he left the Air Force, Kay matriculated at the University of Colorado where he studied Mathematics and Molecular Biology. When he graduated in 1966 he enrolled at the University of Utah in Electrical Engineering.(1)
While studying at the University of Utah he learned about the innovative Sketchpad program developed by Ivan Sutherland and began programming in Simula. Borrowing ideas from this and other systems, as well as from his background in biology and mathematics, he formulated his "biological and algebraic analogy."(4) Kay postulated that the ideal computer would function like a living organism; each "cell" would behave in accord with others to accomplish an end goal but would also be able to function autonomously. Cells could also regroup themselves in order to attack another problem or handle another function.(3)
In the autumn of 1968, Kay first met Seymour Papert at the MIT Artificial Intelligence Laboratory and became interested in the LOGO language. Kay's entire concept of the role of the computer in society was shaken when he watched Papert and his colleagues teaching children how to program in LOGO:
"In 1968 I saw two or three things that sort of changed my whole notion of computing. The way we had been thinking about it was sort of Doug Engelbart's view that the mainframe was like a railroad, owned by an institution that decided what you could do and when you could do it. Engelbart was trying to be like Henry Ford. A personal computer as it was thought of in the sixties was like an automobile. In 1968 I saw Seymour Papert's first work with kids and LOGO, and I saw the first really great handwriting-character-recognition system at Rand. It's a fabulous system. And that had a huge influence on me because it had an intimate feel. When I combined that with the idea that kids had to use it, the concept of a computer because something much more like a supermedium. Something more like a superpaper."(2)
In 1968, after visiting Seymour Papert, Kay began thinking about a book-sized computer that could be used in place of paper. Kay realized such a device would be especially useful for children. The idea prompted him to make a model of a laptop computer. Later, in the 1970s, Kay designed a device he called the "KiddiKomp" which was an inexpensive portable computer with a CRT display to experiment with the idea of portable computing.
After writing a thesis about graphical object-orientation and being awarded a Ph.D. at the University of Utah, he spent two years as a researcher at the Stanford Artificial Intelligence Laboratory. During this time Kay was experimenting with, among other things, programming language design. He also spent some time teaching.
Kay began consulting at Xerox PARC in September of 1970 and joined as a researcher in 1971. He was involved with the design of the Smalltalk programming language during 1971-72 and began using Smalltalk in an educational context thereafter. Young children were exposed to computers and their reactions were analyzed. Together with colleagues at PARC (and influenced by cognitive and developmental psychologists Jean Piaget and Jerome Bruner), Kay concluded that children learned best through a progression that led from kinesthetic involvement, to images and configurations, and finally to the use of symbolic and abstract representations.(4) This research was the motive for Smalltalk's heavy use of graphics and animation. Some of the children exposed to the Smalltalk system became very adept at using it; in fact, some developed complicated programs of their own with it!(3)
Smalltalk's design was influenced by Kay's "biological and algebraic analogy".(4) It featured individual entities, or cells, communicating with each other via messages. Eventually his Smalltalk language would father the genre of Objected Oriented Programming languages.
While leading a research group at PARC, Kay contributed to the development of Ethernet, laser printing, and the client-server network model. Still pondering portable computing, Kay continued to argue for the prototype laptop computer for children which he dubbed the "Dynabook". Sadly, the technology to create a Dynabook did not yet exist. In 1973, Kay, together with Chuck Thacker created an "interim Dynabook" called the Alto which was, arguably, the first modern networked personal computer.(4)
Kay pushed Xerox for funds to develop the Dynabook but the Xerox management, not blessed with Kay's foresight, was not willing to commit major resources to the project. When Steve Jobs, Jeff Raskin, and some other Apple pioneers visited PARC in 1979, however, they recognized immediately that Kay's ideas were the way of the future. They were impressed with the Alto and the idea of a windowing GUI. They were also astounded with the flexibility of the Smalltalk language. Kay's work at PARC was a direct inspiration for the Apple Macintosh computer. Even Microsoft Windows is a scion of Kay's ideas.
Kay left Xerox in 1981 and, after a brief stint at Atari, became an Apple Fellow in 1984 -- the year the Macintosh, the first mass-marketed GUI-centric computer, was released. During the next few years Kay lived Los Angeles but trekked across the country for brief teaching stints at MIT and to work at Apple. Most of his time, however, was spent teaching children to use computers at the Open School in West Hollywood, California.(3)
So what is Kay working on now? In a 1991 interview with Byte he described "Agent based systems." and said he was in the process of writing a new computer language that constructed simulated intelligence within the computer so as to allow the machine to tell itself what to do. An agent, according to Kay, was a kernel of intelligence in the computer. Kay predicted agent-based commercial systems by the year 2000. He envisions a computer that can learn from the user and adapt to the user's needs. He also wants to finally mass-produce his Dynabook.(2)
In my opinion, Kay's most noteworthy contribution to the world of computer science was that of a shifted paradigm; he changed the way both the industry and the world thinks of computers. Before Kay's work, a computer was a non-personal box that spat text at you. If you wanted to interact with this machine you had to learn to speak its language. Kay, because of his experience with children, his love of education, his diverse interests, and his genius, recognized that users can and should interact with a computer in different ways and should not be limited to only text. He was among the first to represent objects in a computer as pictures -- a metaphor that he further extended by developing the concept of object orientation. He is, clearly, one of the fathers of the modern PC.
Concerned with the blindness of society to the latent potential of the computer, Kay worries that the machine he so loves will become some "mass opiate." While the computer could possibly have a negative effect on society and become another television, Kay hopes that it will have a far more beneficial role in the future of humankind.(3) Kay is enraptured by the potential impact that computing technology can have on the world. He is especially interested in education and hopes that this new technology will create, what he calls, a "skeptical man." He likens the personal computer to the present day book and believes that if everyone had access to a computer, people would be more prone to play what-if games with information. He says that "the [information] retrieval systems of the future are not going to retrieve facts but points of view. The weakness of databases is that they let you retrieve facts, while the strength of our culture over the past several hundred years has been our ability to take on multiple points of view. It should be possible for every kid everywhere to test what he or she is being told either against arguments of others or by appeal to computer simulation. The question is: will society nurture that potential or suppress it?"(2)
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