Alan Kay

On May 17, 2010 Alan Kay turned 70, and his friends gave him a book of essays, written by friends of his and by people who have worked with him in different fields. Alan Kay is a true polymath, an artist in the sense described by Leon Battista Alberti: "… the artist in this social context must not be a mere craftsman, but an intellectual trained in every discipline and every field."

Alan Kay said “the best way to predict the future is to invent it”, and he invented the laptop, the graphical user interface (GUI), the direct manipulation metaphor and object-oriented programming. He was one of the most important researchers at Xerox PARC, and the man Steve Jobs wanted to hire to revolutionize the personal computer market.

Alan Kay studied mathematics and molecular biology in the 1960s, and while he studied he worked as a professional jazz guitarist. In 1966 he started studying computer science, and it was that year, on November 11, 1966 (the day I was born), that Alan Kay had a mysterious epiphany that led him to develop the concept of object-oriented programming (a term he coined):

“In 1966, the thing that knocked me over was that Sketchpad was maintaining dynamic relationships. That’s the key to building large system. The other thing that happened in 1966 was thinking about the ARPANet. The idea of having a million machines without any central control. Simula provided a programming form of what SketchPad was doing. My background in biology and math led me to think about algebra and tissues. Barton taught me “The basic principle of recursive design is making the parts as powerful as the whole.” These ideas led me to an insight on November 11, 1966: the timesharing people got it right with processes, but it was too big.

The interesting thing about the object idea is that it’s everywhere. The perversity of science is that world doesn’t change just because we get a different perspective of it.

The secret of PARC’s success was to design the best virtual machine we could and then to build hardware that optimized that. We’ve got that concept backwards today.” (taken from this transcript of a talk by Alan Kay)

Alan Kay is perhaps one of the most revolutionary figures in computing. If you have some time, I suggest reading the essays his friends wrote about him. There are people like the music producer Quincy Jones, Vint Cerf (one of the fathers of the internet), Nicholas Negroponte, Ivan Sutherland, John Sculley and several other important figures who have had the chance to work with this great man.