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| title | chunk | source | category | tags | date_saved | instance |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Alan Kay | 2/2 | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alan_Kay | reference | science, encyclopedia | 2026-05-05T18:14:05.348437+00:00 | kb-cron |
=== Squeak, Etoys, and Croquet === In December 1995, while still at Apple, Kay collaborated with many others to start the open source Squeak version of Smalltalk. As part of this effort, in November 1996, his team began research on what became the Etoys system. More recently he started, with David A. Smith, David P. Reed, Andreas Raab, Rick McGeer, Julian Lombardi, and Mark McCahill, the Croquet Project, an open-source networked 2D and 3D environment for collaborative work.
=== Tweak === In 2001, it became clear that the Etoy architecture in Squeak had reached its limits in what the Morphic interface infrastructure could do. Andreas Raab, a researcher in Kay's group then at Hewlett-Packard, proposed defining a "script process" and providing a default scheduling mechanism that avoided several more general problems. The result was a new user interface, proposed to replace the Squeak Morphic user interface. Tweak added mechanisms of islands, asynchronous messaging, players and costumes, language extensions, projects, and tile scripting. Its underlying object system is class-based, but to users (during programming) it acts as if it were prototype-based. Tweak objects are created and run in Tweak project windows.
=== The Children's Machine === In November 2005, at the World Summit on the Information Society, the MIT research laboratories unveiled a new laptop computer for educational use around the world. It has many names, including the $100 Laptop, the One Laptop per Child program, the Children's Machine, and the XO-1. The program was founded and is sustained by Kay's friend Nicholas Negroponte, and is based on Kay's Dynabook ideal. Kay is a prominent co-developer of the computer, focusing on its educational software using Squeak and Etoys.
=== Reinventing programming === Kay has lectured extensively on the idea that the computer revolution is very new, and all of the good ideas have not been universally implemented. His lectures at the OOPSLA 1997 conference, and his ACM Turing Award talk, "The Computer Revolution Hasn't Happened Yet", were informed by his experiences with Sketchpad, Simula, Smalltalk, and the bloated code of commercial software. On August 31, 2006, Kay's proposal to the United States National Science Foundation (NSF) was granted, funding Viewpoints Research Institute for several years. The proposal title was "STEPS Toward the Reinvention of Programming: A compact and Practical Model of Personal Computing as a Self-exploratorium". STEPS is a recursive acronym that stands for "STEPS Toward Expressive Programming Systems". A sense of what Kay is trying to do comes from this quote, from the abstract of a seminar at Intel Research Labs, Berkeley: "The conglomeration of commercial and most open source software consumes in the neighborhood of several hundreds of millions of lines of code these days. We wonder: how small could be an understandable practical 'Model T' design that covers this functionality? 1M lines of code? 200K LOC? 100K LOC? 20K LOC?"
== Personal life == Kay is a former professional jazz guitarist, composer, and theatrical designer. He also is an amateur classical pipe organist. Kay is a grandson of author, illustrator, and photographer Clifton Johnson, and a nephew of sailor, adventurer, and writer Irving Johnson. Kay is married to the writer, actress, and producer Bonnie MacBird.
== Awards and honors ==
Kay has received many awards and honors, including:
UdK 01-Award in Berlin, Germany for pioneering the GUI; J-D Warnier Prix D'Informatique; NEC C&C Prize (2001) Telluride Tech Festival Award of Technology in Telluride, Colorado (2002) ACM Turing Award "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" (2003) Kyoto Prize; Charles Stark Draper Prize with Butler W. Lampson, Robert W. Taylor and Charles P. Thacker (2004) UPE Abacus Award, for individuals who have provided extensive support and leadership for student-related activities in the computing and information disciplines (2012) Honorary doctorates: – Kungliga Tekniska Högskolan (Royal Institute of Technology) in Stockholm (2002) – Georgia Institute of Technology (2005) – Columbia College Chicago awarded Doctor of Humane Letters, Honoris Causa (2005) – Laurea Honoris Causa in Informatica, Università di Pisa, Italy (2007) – University of Waterloo (2008) – Kyoto University (2009) – Universidad de Murcia (2010) – University of Edinburgh (2017) Honorary Professor, Berlin University of the Arts Elected fellow of: – American Academy of Arts and Sciences – National Academy of Engineering for inventing the concept of portable personal computing. (1997) – Royal Society of Arts – Computer History Museum "for his fundamental contributions to personal computing and human-computer interface development." (1999) – Association for Computing Machinery "For fundamental contributions to personal computing and object-oriented programming." (2008) – Hasso Plattner Institute (2011) His other honors include the J-D Warnier Prix d'Informatique, the ACM Systems Software Award, the NEC Computers & Communication Foundation Prize, the Funai Foundation Prize, the Lewis Branscomb Technology Award, and the ACM SIGCSE Award for Outstanding Contributions to Computer Science Education.
== See also == List of pioneers in computer science
== References ==
== External links ==
Viewpoints Research Institute Alan Kay at TED "There is no information content in Alan Kay" 2012 Programming a problem-oriented language, an unpublished book, by Charles H. Moore, June 1970