Alan Curtis Kay is an American computer scientist best known for his pioneering work on object-oriented programming and windowing graphical user interface design. While at the ARPA project at the University of Utah in the late 1960s, he invented dynamic object-oriented programming. Working at Xerox PARC, his credo was, “the best way to predict the future is to invent it.” One of his visionary concepts was the Dynabook, a powerful and portable electronic device—the size of a three-ring notebook with a touch-sensitive liquid crystal screen and a keyboard for entering information. Laptops, notebook computers, and tablets have roots in the early concepts of the Dynabook. People needed a method for interacting with the new computer medium. To help with this, Kay and the members of his lab created graphical interfaces and the Smalltalk programming language. He is considered by some as the “father of personal computers” because he envisioned a small computing system in the 1970’s, long before notebook computers were available He is the founder-president of Viewpoints Research Institute, a non-profit organization dedicated to children and the One Laptop Per Child initiative. An important contributor to the Squeak project, he is part of the ongoing research called Etoys System.
