Editing Alan Kay (section)

== Early life and work ==

In an interview on education in America with the Davis Group Ltd., Kay said:

{{Blockquote|I had the misfortune or the fortune to learn how to read fluently starting about the age of three, so I had read maybe 150 books by the time I hit first grade, and I already knew the teachers were lying to me.<ref>{{cite web |url=http://vimeo.com/20673320 |title=Interview with Alan Kay on education |work=The Generational Divide |publisher=The Davis Group |access-date=5 March 2011}}</ref>}}

Originally from [[Springfield, Massachusetts]], Kay's family relocated several times due to his father's career in [[physiology]] before ultimately settling in the [[New York metropolitan area]].

He attended [[Brooklyn Technical High School]]. Having accumulated enough credits to graduate, he then attended [[Bethany College (West Virginia)|Bethany College]] in [[Bethany, West Virginia]], where he majored in [[biology]] and minored in mathematics.

Kay then taught guitar in [[Denver]], Colorado for a year. He was drafted in the [[United States Army]], then qualified for officer training in the [[United States Air Force]], where he became a [[computer programmer]] after passing an aptitude test.

After his discharge, he enrolled at the [[University of Colorado Boulder]] and earned a Bachelor of Science (B.S.) in mathematics and [[molecular biology]] in 1966.

In the autumn of 1966, he began graduate school at the [[University of Utah College of Engineering]]. He earned a [[Master of Science]] in [[electrical engineering]] in 1968, then a [[Doctor of Philosophy]] in [[computer science]] in 1969. His doctoral dissertation, ''FLEX: A Flexible Extendable Language'', described the invention of a [[computer language]] named [[Flex (language)|FLEX]].<ref>{{cite web |last=Kay |first=Alan |year=1968 |url=http://www.dtic.mil/dtic/tr/fulltext/u2/761962.pdf |archive-url=https://web.archive.org/web/20170208052455/http://www.dtic.mil/dtic/tr/fulltext/u2/761962.pdf |url-status=dead |archive-date=February 8, 2017 |title=FLEX: A Flexible Extendable Language |website=University of Utah}}</ref><ref name="H. Peter Alesso, C.F. Smith">{{cite book |last1=Alesso |first1=H. Peter |last2=Smith |first2=C.F. |year=2008 |url=https://books.google.com/books?id=DxGyOaAyd6gC&q=Connections:+Patterns+of+Discovery |title=Connections: Patterns of Discovery |page=61 |publisher=John Wiley & Sons |isbn=978-0-470-11881-8 |series=Wiley Series on Systems Engineering and Analysis, 29 |access-date=August 15, 2015}}</ref><ref>{{cite web |last=Barnes |first=S. B. |url=http://ethw.org/images/2/23/Barnes.pdf |title=Alan Kay: Transforming the Computer Into a Communication Medium |publisher=Engineering & Technology History Wiki |archive-url=https://web.archive.org/web/20160701083057/http://ethw.org/Images/2/23/Barnes.pdf |archive-date=July 1, 2016}}</ref> While there, he worked with "fathers of [[computer graphics]]" [[David C. Evans (computer scientist)|David C. Evans]] (who had recently been recruited from the [[University of California, Berkeley]] to start Utah's computer science department) and [[Ivan Sutherland]] (best known for writing such pioneering programs as [[Sketchpad]]). Kay credits Sutherland's 1963 thesis for influencing his views on [[Object (computer science)|objects]] and [[computer programming]]. As he grew busier with research for the [[Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency]] (DARPA), he ended his musical career.

In 1968, he met [[Seymour Papert]] and learned of the programming language [[Logo (programming language)|Logo]], a [[Dialect (computing)|dialect]] of [[Lisp (programming language)|Lisp]] optimized for educational purposes. This led him to learn of the work of [[Jean Piaget]], [[Jerome Bruner]], [[Lev Vygotsky]], and of [[Constructionism (learning theory)|constructionist learning]], further influencing his professional orientation. On December 9 of that same year he was present in San Francisco for the [[The Mother of All Demos|Mother of all Demos]], a landmark computer demonstration by [[Douglas Engelbart]]. Even though he was sick with a high fever on that day, the event was very influential in Kay's career. He recalled later: "It was one of the greatest experiences in my life".<ref>{{Cite book |last=Kennedy |first=Pagan |title=Inventology: How we dream up things that change the world |publisher=Mariner Books |year=2016 |isbn=9780544811928 |location=Boston |pages=115}}</ref>

In 1969, Kay became a visiting researcher at the [[Stanford Artificial Intelligence Laboratory]] in anticipation of accepting a professorship at [[Carnegie Mellon University]]. Instead, in 1970, he joined the [[Xerox]] [[PARC (company)|PARC]] research staff in [[Palo Alto, California]]. Through the decade, he developed prototypes of networked workstations using the programming language [[Smalltalk]].

Along with some colleagues at PARC, Kay is one of the fathers of the idea of [[object-oriented programming]] (OOP), which he named.<ref name="Ram 2003 Kay on objects">{{cite web | last=Ram | first=Stefan L. | title=Dr. Alan Kay on the Meaning of "Object-Oriented Programming" (document) | publisher=Stefan L. Ram, Berlin, Germany. | date=2003-07-23 | url=https://www.purl.org/stefan_ram/pub/doc_kay_oop_en | access-date=2024-02-15}}</ref> Some original object-oriented concepts, including the use of the words 'object' and 'class', had been developed for [[Simula]] 67 at the [[Norwegian Computing Center]]. Kay said:

<blockquote>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 "[[Message passing|messaging]]".<ref>{{Cite web |url=http://lists.squeakfoundation.org/pipermail/squeak-dev/1998-October/017019.html |title=AlanKayOnMessaging}}</ref></blockquote>

While at PARC, Kay conceived the [[Dynabook]] concept, a key progenitor of laptop and [[tablet computer|tablet]] computers and the [[e-book]]. He is also the architect of the modern overlapping windowing [[graphical user interface]] (GUI).<ref>{{Cite book | last1=Bergin | first1=Thomas J. Jr. | last2=Gibson | first2=Richard G. Jr. |place=New York, NY |year=1996 |publisher=ACM Press, Addison-Wesley |title=History of Programming Languages II |url=http://portal.acm.org/citation.cfm?id=234286 | isbn=978-0-201-89502-5 | doi=10.1145/234286}}</ref> Because the Dynabook was conceived as an educational platform, he is considered one of the first researchers into [[mobile learning]]; many features of the Dynabook concept have been adopted in the design of the [[One Laptop Per Child]] educational platform,<ref>{{citation|url=http://www.laptop.org/en/vision/project/index.shtml|title=History|publisher=One Laptop Per Child|access-date=July 18, 2020|archive-date=July 6, 2020|archive-url=https://web.archive.org/web/20200706231744/http://laptop.org/en/vision/project/index.shtml|url-status=dead}}</ref> with which Kay is actively involved.