“By the time I got to school I had already read a couple hundred books. I knew in the first grade that they were lying to me because I had already been exposed to other points of view. School is basically about one point of view - the one the teacher has or the textbooks have. They don’t like the idea of having different points of view, so it was a battle. of course I would pipe up with my five-year-old voice.”

Alan Kay has never accepted the status quo, nor does he accept mediocrity. He discovered the necessity of looking to children for research, especially in his field, artificial intelligence and interface design.

Alan Kay has his B.S. in mathematics and Molecular Biology at the University of Colorado, his M.S. in electrical engineering from the University of Utah, and his Ph.D. in computer science from the University of Utah. His doctoral thesis was about graphical orientation.Since then he has taught at the Stanford Artificial Intelligence Laboratory in 1970 where he began to visualize a book-sized computer called kiddiekomp. Kay was group leader at Xerox Parc, where he began to experiment with his object-oriented environment (Smalltalk) in an educational context. Kay believed that children learned more through images and sounds than through plain text. Also while at Xerox, Kay made a model of a laptop computer called the Dynabook, however, the technology wasn’t around to support this innovation at the time, and he couldn’t get Xerox to support his ideas with the necessary funding.

Kay was also a programmer for Atari, an Apple Fellow, and is currently a Disney Fellow working at Walt Disney World in Orlando.

Dr. Kay realized how much educational research was important to the development of computer technology. To Kay, computer technology is a merger between need and the development intended to satisfy that need.

Alan Kay was influenced by Douglas Englebart with whom he worked at Xerox Parc, and Seymour Papert. Kay’s concept was drastically changed from his exposure to Seymour Papert as he watched him and his colleagues teaching childre how to program using LOGO. Kay hopes that the technology we have will create a “skeptical man”. People prone to play games of what-if and question why instead of blindly following.

Publications

"The Early History of SmallTalk", in Bergin, Jr., T.J., and R.G. Gibson.

History of Programming Languages - II, ACM Press, New York NY, and Addison-Wesley Publ. Co., Reading MA 1996, pp. 511-578, with additional commentary and transcripts.