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Alan Kay

File:Alan_Kay_and_the_prototype_of_the_Dynabook_(3009206205).jpg · Wikimedia Commons · See Wikimedia Commons

EntityQ92742· pop 50· linked from 404 articles

Also known as Alan Curtis Kay, Alan C. Kay

American computer scientist (born 1940)

In the Vinony graph

Alan Kay is indexed among the 79 entries in Vinony's Turing Award collection. It also appears in American Academy of Arts & Sciences.

Vinony's link graph records 404 inbound references to Alan Kay, and connects out to programming language, Vint Cerf and Smalltalk.

It sits within the topics 1940 births, Academic staff of the Berlin University of the Arts and American computer programmers.

Vinony links it to 39 Wikipedia language editions.

Person · Open Library

Born
1920
Works
9

Top works

  • Mental Health and Learning Disability
  • My Generations
  • Margate
  • Creative art through photography
  • Francis Frith's The Cinque Ports and the two ancient towns

via Open Library + Wikidata

Music · MusicBrainz

Type
Person
Country
US
Active from
1922-07-21
Active to
2016-11-03

via MusicBrainz · CC0

Listeners · Last.fm

Listeners
346
Total plays
673

<a href="https://www.last.fm/music/Alan+Kay">Read more on Last.fm</a>

via Last.fm · Alan Kay

Quotes

  • The best way to predict the future is to invent it.
  • [ Computing ] is just a fabulous place for that, because it's a place where you don't have to be a Ph.D. or anything else. It's a place where you can still be an artisan. People are willing to pay you if you're any good at all, and you have plenty of time for screwing around.
  • People who are really serious about software should make their own hardware.
  • A change in perspective is worth 80 IQ points.
  • Technology is anything that wasn't around when you were born.
  • The future is not laid out on a track. It is something that we can decide, and to the extent that we do not violate any known laws of the universe, we can probably make it work the way that we want to.

via Wikiquote · CC BY-SA

Key facts

Born
Alan Curtis Kay , ( 1940-05-17 ) May 17, 1940 (age 86) , Springfield, Massachusetts , U.S.
Education
University of Colorado, Boulder ( BS ), University of Utah ( MS , PhD )
Known for
Dynabook , Object-oriented programming , Smalltalk , Desktop metaphor , Graphical user interface , Windows
Spouse
Bonnie MacBird
Awards
ACM Turing Award (2003), Kyoto Prize , Charles Stark Draper Prize
Fields
Computer science
Institutions
Xerox PARC , Stanford University , Atari Inc. , Apple Inc. ATG , Walt Disney Imagineering , UCLA , Kyoto University , MIT , Viewpoints Research Institute , Hewlett-Packard Labs
Thesis
FLEX: A Flexible Extendable Language (1968)
Doctoral advisors
David C. Evans , Robert S. Barton
Notable students
David Canfield Smith

via Wikipedia infobox

Wikidata facts

Image
Alan Kay (3097597186) (cropped).jpg
Show 3 more facts
Commons category
Alan Kay
date of birth
1940-05-17
Erdős number
8
Sources (10)

via Wikidata · CC0

~12 min read

Encyclopedic overview

Alan Curtis Kay (born May 17, 1940) is an American computer scientist who pioneered work on object-oriented programming and windowing graphical user interface (GUI) design. At Xerox PARC he led the design and development of the first modern windowed computer desktop interface. There he also led the development of the influential object-oriented programming language Smalltalk, both personally designing most of the early versions of the language and coining the term "object-oriented." He has been elected a Fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, the National Academy of Engineering, and the Royal Society of Arts. He received the Turing Award in 2003.

Early life and work

Excerpted from Wikipedia’s “Alan Kay” article, available under the CC BY-SA 4.0 licence.

Gallery (4)

Connections

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