Alan Kay

Alan Curtis Kay (b. 17 May 1940) is the American computer scientist who, in the 1970s at Xerox PARC, led the development of Smalltalk and articulated object-oriented programming as a discipline. In the same period he set out the Dynabook — an A4-sized, battery-powered, wirelessly networked personal computer for children — anticipating laptops and tablets by some decades. ACM Turing Award, 2003. He is widely known for the line, "The best way to predict the future is to invent it."

Background

Kay was born on 17 May 1940 in Springfield, Massachusetts. His father was a physiologist and his mother both a musician and an artist; Kay has played serious jazz guitar throughout his life. He read voraciously and largely on his own as a child — he has said that he has almost no memory of being taught anything at school.

From 1961 to 1966 he served in the United States Air Force as a programmer on the IBM 1401. After discharge he took a BS in mathematics and molecular biology from the University of Colorado at Boulder (1966), then graduate study at the University of Utah, where under Ivan Sutherland and David Evans he encountered early computer graphics and the earliest form of object-oriented thinking. He took his MS in 1968 and his PhD in computer science in 1969. The doctoral dissertation, The Reactive Engine, describes FLEX — a direct precursor to Smalltalk.

Major Contributions

Xerox PARC and Smalltalk (1971-1981)

In 1971 Kay arrived at the newly founded Xerox PARC (Palo Alto Research Center) and was given the Learning Research Group to lead. Together with Robert Taylor, Butler Lampson, Charles Thacker, Dan Ingalls, Adele Goldberg and the rest of PARC's first cohort, he helped to invent almost the entire prototype of modern personal computing in one building over one decade.

Smalltalk was first implemented by Dan Ingalls in 1971-72 and matured through Smalltalk-76 to the public Smalltalk-80 release of 1980. The form of object orientation Smalltalk embodied was not the static "set of classes with methods" later inherited by C++ (Bjarne Stroustrup, 1985) and Java (1995), but a far more biological metaphor: a network of small, independent computers passing messages to each other. Kay has repeatedly said that "what really matters in OOP is messaging, local retention, and late binding," and has on several occasions stated bluntly that the C++ family of object orientation is "not what I meant."

The Xerox Alto (1973), built around a bitmap display, a mouse, WYSIWYG editing, Ethernet and Smalltalk, was the first integrated personal computer; the visit by Steve Jobs and the Apple team in 1979, and the cascade of borrowings into the Lisa and Macintosh GUI designs, started there.

The Dynabook (1968-1972)

Kay had been forming the idea since Utah and published it in 1972 as the paper "A Personal Computer for Children of All Ages." The Dynabook was to be A4-sized, light, battery-powered, wirelessly networked, equipped with a high-resolution display, and capable of holding "all your thoughts and information, all the time."

The Dynabook was never built as such, but practically every laptop and tablet that has followed — ThinkPad, iBook, iPad, Surface — has been an asymptotic approach to its 1972 description. Kay himself, in interviews since the 2010s, has assessed the iPad rather coldly: "the current iPad is a diluted Dynabook — if a child cannot actually do serious programming and scientific reasoning on it, the heart of the idea is missing."

Career

• 1981-1984 — Chief Scientist, Atari.
• 1984-1996 — Apple Fellow (Vivarium project, among others).
• 1996-2001 — Disney Fellow at Walt Disney Imagineering.
• 2001-present — Founder and President, Viewpoints Research Institute.
• 2002-present — HP Fellow (carried over into HP Inc. after the company split).
• 2017-present — Adjunct Professor of Computer Science, UCLA.

Etoys, Squeak and STEPS (1996-2012)

While at Disney, Kay started Squeak (an open-source modern Smalltalk) and Etoys (an authoring environment for children). These supplied the original software environment of the One Laptop Per Child XO laptop in 2007.

From 2006 to 2012, with more than five million dollars in funding from the US National Science Foundation, Kay led the STEPS project at Viewpoints Research Institute. The question was whether all the functionality of a complete personal computer — operating system, networking, GUI, productivity applications — could be reconstructed in less than twenty thousand lines of code. The work was reported annually under the title Steps Toward The Reinvention of Programming. It achieved its core target — OMeta, Nile, Frank and a stack of domain-specific languages compressing a complete interactive system into roughly twenty thousand lines — without producing a commercial follow-on.

Awards and Honours

• 1999 — ACM Software System Award (for Smalltalk-80).
• 2001 — Kyoto Prize for Information Science.
• 2003 — 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."
• 2004 — ACM Fellow; IEEE Fellow.
• 2004 — Charles Stark Draper Prize, jointly with Butler Lampson, Robert Taylor and Charles Thacker.

Current Activities

Kay continues to lead Viewpoints Research Institute and works with a small group of collaborators at UCLA on the long-standing question of "a small, powerful language and environment for children — that adults can also learn through." There was a report in 2018 that VPRI had paused operations, but his LinkedIn profile and subsequent speaking record show him still as its president.

He has been comparatively active on the lecture circuit, with talks at the University of Strasbourg (2023), SIGCSE (2024) and a Strange Loop legacy event (2025). His recurring theme is the impoverishment of present-day computing education — its reduction to vocational training, and the abandonment of the computer as a tool for thinking. In the same tone, he has kept a careful distance from the current AI surge, characterising large language models as "improved memory and retrieval, not creative thought."

Legacy

Kay's influence is most easily measured along four axes: the graphical user interface, object orientation, the ideal of the personal computer, and "programming for children." On the GUI and personal computer, Jobs's 1979 visit to PARC fed directly into the Lisa and Macintosh, and from there into Microsoft Windows and the whole modern GUI lineage. On object orientation, Smalltalk's genes are thinly and widely distributed through C++, Objective-C, Java, Ruby and Python, although Kay's preferred message-centric reading of OOP is best preserved in the Erlang/OTP and Actor-model tradition.

In educational programming, Kay is the spiritual grandparent of the Smalltalk → Logo → Scratch → Etoys → Snap! / Microsoft MakeCode lineage; in 2025 it is still routine for primary-school computing curricula to cite his 1972 paper.

"The best way to predict the future is to invent it" was, by Kay's own account, a remark in an internal PARC meeting at the founding of the lab in 1971. Half a century later, alongside the laptop, the tablet, the GUI and object orientation, the sentence too has become one of the things he invented.