Alan Kay

Alan Kay: The Man Who Saw the Laptop in 1968

Alan Kay sketched a "powerful and portable electronic device the size of a three-ring notebook with a touch-sensitive liquid crystal screen and a keyboard" more than a decade before anyone could build one. He called it the Dynabook. It would take until the 1990s for the hardware to catch up to the drawing, and by then Kay had already reshaped how software itself was written.

From Jazz Guitar to Object-Oriented Code

Kay's route into computing was anything but linear. Born in 1940 and raised across several states as his father's physiology career moved the family, he attended Brooklyn Technical High School, studied biology and mathematics at Bethany College in West Virginia, and took time out to play guitar professionally in Denver before finishing a mathematics and molecular biology degree at the University of Colorado Boulder in 1966. He then went to the University of Utah, one of the era's few serious computer graphics programs, earning a master's in electrical engineering in 1968 and a Ph.D. in computer science in 1969 under graphics pioneers David Evans and Ivan Sutherland. His dissertation, "FLEX: A Flexible Extendable Language," already carried the seed of an idea he would spend a career elaborating: that a computer language could be built from small, self-contained units that send each other messages, rather than one long list of instructions acting on shared data.

Xerox PARC and the Birth of Smalltalk

Kay joined the newly formed Xerox Palo Alto Research Center in 1970, where he led the Learning Research Group. There he designed most of the early versions of Smalltalk himself, the first fully dynamic object-oriented programming language and, more importantly, a complete computing environment — with its own debugger, editor, virtual memory, and overlapping-window graphical interface running on the Alto workstation. It was Kay who coined the term "object-oriented programming," although he later said he regretted the label: "I'm sorry that I long ago coined the term 'objects' for this topic, because it gets many people to focus on the lesser idea. The big idea is 'messaging.'" That insistence on communication between independent, encapsulated pieces of software — rather than on the objects themselves — became one of the deepest and most argued-over ideas in the history of programming languages, and it underwrites the graphical, windowed interface that every modern computer and phone still uses.

The Dynabook and a Vision Ahead of Its Hardware

The Smalltalk work at PARC was never conceived as an end in itself; it was the software half of a hardware idea Kay had been carrying since Utah. He imagined a book-sized personal computer for children — something a child could carry, draw on, program, and learn from, unconnected to any institution's mainframe. The Dynabook was never built as Kay first described it in 1968, but its DNA runs through the Alto, through the Macintosh interface Kay's PARC colleagues helped inspire, and eventually through real laptops, tablets, and e-readers. Kay treated the gap between the idea and the object as instructive rather than embarrassing, later observing that computing's revolution was "very new, and all of the good ideas have not been universally implemented" — a line that doubled as both a boast and an indictment of an industry he thought had settled for far less than it could achieve.

After PARC: Atari, Apple, Disney

Kay's career after Xerox reads like a tour of Silicon Valley's most idea-hungry corners. He was chief scientist at Atari from 1981 to 1984, an Apple Fellow from 1984 to 1997, and a Disney Fellow at Walt Disney Imagineering from 1997 onward. In 2001 he founded the nonprofit Viewpoints Research Institute to keep pursuing his long-running interest in simplifying software and improving how children learn with computers, and he later held a senior fellowship at HP Labs and academic appointments at UCLA, Kyoto University, and MIT. Throughout, he kept building teaching tools rather than commercial products: Squeak, an open-source Smalltalk descendant, in 1995; Etoys, an educational programming environment built on it, the following year; and later the Croquet networked 3D collaboration project. He also contributed to the One Laptop Per Child initiative, a direct descendant of the Dynabook idea aimed at children in the developing world.

Recognition

In 2003 the Association for Computing Machinery gave Kay its Turing Award — computing's Nobel equivalent — "for pioneering many of the ideas at the root of contemporary object-oriented programming languages, leading the team that developed Smalltalk, and for fundamental contributions to personal computing." The following year brought both the Kyoto Prize and the Charles Stark Draper Prize, the latter shared with fellow PARC alumni Butler Lampson, Robert Taylor, and Charles Thacker for the invention of the personal computer. He holds honorary doctorates from institutions including Georgia Tech, the University of Edinburgh, and Kyoto University, and is a fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences and the National Academy of Engineering.

Why Alan Is Called a Genius

The case for Kay's genius rests less on any single invention than on a habit of seeing systems whole before the parts existed to build them: a personal, book-sized computer for children, sketched in 1968 when computers filled rooms; a windowed graphical interface designed years before anyone had a screen fine enough to need one; a programming paradigm built around "messaging" between independent objects, which he arrived at partly through his undergraduate training in biology, thinking of cells communicating rather than programs executing. The Turing Award committee credited him with "pioneering" the ideas beneath object-oriented programming — a judgment about originality of thought, not just engineering execution. The honest counter-case is that Kay was one architect among several at a uniquely resourced institution; Xerox PARC's Learning Research Group and its neighboring labs included other formidable thinkers, and much of what made the Dynabook and Smalltalk usable, rather than merely visionary, was collective work Kay himself has consistently credited to his team. Kay has also spent decades pointedly arguing that the computing industry never finished — or even understood — the ideas he and his colleagues put forward, a critique that is as much a measure of unrealized ambition as of achievement.

Legacy

Every laptop, tablet, and windowed operating system in use today descends, at some remove, from a device Kay described before it could be built and a language he designed to run on it. He remains, in his own telling, less interested in what was accomplished than in what still hasn't been: an unfinished computer revolution he has spent sixty years trying to complete.

Achievements

• Turing Award — 2003
• Kyoto Prize in Advanced Technology — 2004
• Affiliated with University of California, Los Angeles, Massachusetts Institute of Technology and Palo Alto Research Center
• Educated at University of Utah, University of Colorado Boulder and University of Colorado
• Worked as computer scientist, programmer and jazz musician