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Alan Kay

Person

A colour close-up of the face of an older man with greying hair and a moustache, against a black background.
Alan Kay. Photo by Marcin Wichary.Source: Marcin Wichary, via Wikimedia Commons (opens in a new tab)License: CC BY 2.0 (opens in a new tab)

Alan Curtis Kay was born on 17 May 1940 in Springfield, Massachusetts. In 1970 he joined Xerox PARC in Palo Alto, where he built prototypes of networked workstations.

The Dynabook concept also came out of Xerox PARC and was described in his 1972 paper “A Personal Computer for Children of All Ages”. Kay led the development of Smalltalk and coined the term “object-oriented”. He received the Turing Award in 2003.

In my articles

In my second brain series, Kay is one of the pioneers whom Tiago Forte lists alongside Vannevar Bush, because they dreamt of technology that would enhance human intellect.

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