Alan Kay

Alan Kay married Bonnie Lynn MacBird in 1983. She is an actress, playwright, screenwriter and producer known for co-writing the science fiction film ‘Tron’ and has two Emmys for production to her credit.

Alan Curtis Kay was born in Springfield, Massachusetts. His father designed arm and leg prostheses, and his mother was a musician. He had read about 150 books before he started school.

He attended the University of Colorado at Boulder, earning a Bachelor's degree in Mathematics and Molecular Biology. Before and during this time, he worked as a professional jazz guitarist.

In 1966, he joined graduate school at the University of Utah College of Engineering, earning Master’s degree and a Ph.D. There, he worked with Ivan Sutherland, a pioneer in graphics programs including Sketchpad.

In 1968, Kay met Seymour Papert and learned of the Logo programming language, a dialect of Lisp. He created Logo as a tool to improve the way children think and solve the problems.

He studied the works of Jean Piaget, Jerome Bruner, Lev Vygotsky, and constructionist learning that believed individual learners construct mental models to understand the world around them.

In 1970, he joined Xerox Corporation's Palo Alto Research Center, PARC. and was one of the key members there to develop prototypes of networked workstations using the programming language Smalltalk used for constructive learning

He pioneered the idea of object-oriented programming (OOP) along with some colleagues at PARC and predecessors at the Norwegian Computing Center. C++, Objective-C, Smalltalk, Java, C#, Perl, Python, Ruby and PHP are examples of OOP.

Closely related to his Dynabook concept, he was actively involved in the One Laptop per Child project which aims at creating affordable educational devices for use in the developing world.

Kay conceived the Dynabook concept by 1972 which laid the foundation for laptop and tablet computers and E-books. Thus, he is the architect of the modern overlapping windowing graphical user interface (GUI) and mobile learning.

Kay is an important contributor to the Squeak project and is part of the ongoing research called Etoys System, a Squeak based educational programming which is child friendly for use in education.