Kay, Alan

Alan Kay, in full Alan Curtis Kay, (born May 17, 1940, Springfield, Massachusetts, U.S.), American computer scientist and winner of the 2003 A.M. Turing Award, the highest honour in computer science, for his contributions to object-oriented programming languages, including Smalltalk, and to personal computing.

Kay received a bachelor’s degree in mathematics and molecular biology from the University of Colorado at Boulder in 1966 and a doctorate in computer science from the University of Utah in 1969. While in graduate school, he worked on FLEX, a small computer. His work on FLEX and the influence of American inventor Douglas Engelbart’s work on graphical user interfaces led him to devise the Dynabook, a concept for a small tablet-style computer with a flat screen. Kay never built a Dynabook, but his ideas for a portable computer later found fruition in laptops and tablets.

Kay then joined the Stanford Artificial Intelligence Laboratory, where he became interested in how children could use computers. In 1972 he joined Xerox Corporation’s Palo Alto Research Center and worked on the first object-oriented programming language (Smalltalk) for educational applications. He contributed to the development of Ethernet, laser printing, and client-server architecture.

Kay left Xerox in 1983 and became a fellow at Apple Computer, Inc. (now Apple Inc.), in 1984. His design of a graphical user interface for operating systems (OS) was used in Apple’s Mac OS and later in Microsoft Corporation’s Windows OS. He was a fellow at the Walt Disney Company (1996–2001) and the Hewlett-Packard Company (2002–05). He shared the Charles Stark Draper Prize in 2004 with Butler W. Lampson, Robert W. Taylor, and Charles P. Thacker for their work on personal computers.