Alan Kay

Alan Kay is an American computer scientist best known as one of the principal architects of object-oriented programming and of the graphical user interface concepts that underlie modern personal computing. Working at Xerox PARC in the 1970s, Kay led the design of the Smalltalk programming language, which introduced windows, icons and a bitmap display as an integrated working environment, and he articulated the vision of the Dynabook, a portable personal computer intended for use by children, well before the hardware existed to build one. His early career included work on the Utah graphics program and the FLEX machine, and he later worked at Atari, Apple and Hewlett-Packard while continuing to advocate for computing as a medium for learning rather than only a tool for calculation. Kay received the Turing Award in 2003 for his pioneering contributions to object-oriented programming language design, and he is widely credited with the maxim that the best way to predict the future is to invent it.