Kay, Alan

1940–

Computer Scientist

Alan Kay is considered a creative visionary in the area of interactive computing, or “dynamic media” as he has called it. He has influenced the nature of personal computing while working as a researcher at Xerox, Atari, Apple, and most recently Disney. His principal contributions have been in the fields of human-computer interaction and object-oriented programming.

Born in Springfield, Massachusetts, in 1940, Kay spent his early childhood in Australia, returning to the United States before the end of World War II. His father, a physiologist and researcher, and his mother, a musician, fed Kay's early inquisitiveness; by the time he had reached first grade, he was already well read. The young Kay had difficulties with the rigidity of school, and found himself at odds with school administrators from elementary school through college. He eventually made his way to Denver, Colorado, where he decided to enlist in the air force. After he took a programming aptitude test on a lark, the air force sent him to a two-week training program with IBM, which sparked his lifelong interest in how computers are used. He also finished an undergraduate degree in mathematics and molecular biology at the University of Colorado.

Kay attended graduate school at the University of Utah, and worked under David Evans on an ARPA-funded research project on computer graphics. In his dissertation, Kay described what a “personal computer” might consist of, an idea that would serve in some ways as a model for the Xerox Alto computer. The manifestation of this idea, the FLEX, was a 350-pound machine that reflected some of his ideas about both personal computing and object-oriented programming. Influenced by a visit to Utah by Doug Engelbart in 1967, a demonstration of one of the first flat-panel displays in 1968, and Seymour Papert's work with children and the programming environment called LOGO, Kay began thinking about how the FLEX might be incorporated in a laptop device, a device that he called the Dynabook.

After receiving a Ph.D. in computer science in 1969, Kay worked at the renowned Stanford Artificial Intelligence Laboratory before being recruited by Xerox's Palo Alto Research Center (PARC), where he formed the Learning Research Group. With some effort, Kay convinced other PARC researchers to explore his vision of a personal computer. The result of a marathon design and construction effort, the Alto can fairly be considered to be the first personal computer, at least as we think of them today. For Kay, the Alto was the beginning, and not the end.

In the years following the first Alto, Kay's group made significant inroads into interactive programming and multimedia. With others at PARC, Kay helped to create the first graphical user interfaces (GUIs); GUIs are now central features of most operating systems. He and his group also created some of the first interactive documents and markup languages, as well as tools for creating music with computers.

Kay might have been content to work in relative obscurity but for a 1972 article in Rolling Stone magazine reporting on the first computer game, called Spacewar! The article provided a view of the personal computer that aligned nicely with Kay's own views, and quoted his prognostications and aphorisms liberally. The notoriety provided by the article would shape the public view of PARC for years to come, and would arguably make Kay the first superstar of computer science.

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