42-450: Alan Curtis Kay (born May 17, 1940) is an American computer scientist best known for his pioneering work on object-oriented programming and windowing graphical user interface (GUI) design. At Xerox PARC he led the design and development of the first modern windowed computer desktop interface. There he also led the development of the influential object-oriented programming language Smalltalk , both personally designing most of
84-463: A collaborative real-time editor . Engelbart's presentation was the first to publicly demonstrate all of these elements in a single system. The demonstration was highly influential and spawned similar projects at Xerox PARC in the early 1970s. The underlying concepts and technologies influenced both the Apple Macintosh and Microsoft Windows graphical user interface operating systems in
126-602: A Disney Fellow. He remained there until Ferren left to start Applied Minds Inc with Imagineer Danny Hillis , leading to the cessation of the Fellows program. In 2001, Kay founded Viewpoints Research Institute, a nonprofit organization dedicated to children, learning, and advanced software development. For their first ten years, Kay and his Viewpoints group were based at Applied Minds in Glendale, California , where he and Ferren worked on various projects. Kay served as president of
168-558: A United States Navy radar technician in the Philippines in 1946. In Engelbart's view, in order to steer society into the right use of scientific knowledge derived from the war, that knowledge would need to be better managed and regulated. In his book From Counterculture to Cyberculture , Fred Turner gave voice to this view, which arose from seeing the unintended effects of technology on the postwar world: [T]he American military had developed technologies with which it might destroy
210-526: A large 6.7 metres (22 ft) high screen so the audience could see what Engelbart was doing. The Augment researchers also created two customized homemade modems at 1200 baud – high-speed for 1968 – linked via a leased line to transfer data from the computer workstation keyboard and mouse at the Civic Auditorium to their Menlo Park headquarters' SDS-940 computer . In order to provide live two-way video between
252-471: A philosophy of 'bootstrapping', in which each experimental transformation of the socio-technical system that was the NLS would feed back into the system itself, causing it to evolve (and presumably to improve). Prior to the demonstration, a significant portion of the computer science community thought Engelbart was "a crackpot". When he was finished, he was described as "dealing lightning with both hands". Van Dam
294-405: A tool for communications and information-retrieval. He wanted to turn Vannevar Bush 's idea for a Memex machine into reality, where a machine used interactively by one person could "augment" their intelligence. Over the course of six years, with the funding help of both NASA and ARPA , his team went about putting together all the elements that would make such a computer system a reality. At
336-610: A year. He was drafted in the United States Army , then qualified for officer training in the United States Air Force , where he became a computer programmer after passing an aptitude test. After his discharge, he enrolled at the University of Colorado Boulder and earned a Bachelor of Science (B.S.) in mathematics and molecular biology in 1966. In the autumn of 1966, he began graduate school at
378-778: Is a former professional jazz guitarist , composer, and theatrical designer. He also is an amateur classical pipe organist . Kay has received many awards and honors, including: His other honors include the J-D Warnier Prix d'Informatique, the ACM Systems Software Award, the NEC Computers & Communication Foundation Prize, the Funai Foundation Prize, the Lewis Branscomb Technology Award, and
420-805: Is considered one of the first researchers into mobile learning ; many features of the Dynabook concept have been adopted in the design of the One Laptop Per Child educational platform, with which Kay is actively involved. From 1981 to 1984, Kay was Chief Scientist at Atari . In 1984, he became an Apple Fellow. After the closure of the Apple Advanced Technology Group in 1997, he was recruited by his friend Bran Ferren , head of research and development at Disney , to join Walt Disney Imagineering as
462-418: Is trying to do comes from this quote, from the abstract of a seminar at Intel Research Labs, Berkeley: "The conglomeration of commercial and most open source software consumes in the neighborhood of several hundreds of millions of lines of code these days. We wonder: how small could be an understandable practical 'Model T' design that covers this functionality? 1M lines of code? 200K LOC? 100K LOC? 20K LOC?" Kay
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#1732780239274504-713: The Croquet Project , an open-source networked 2D and 3D environment for collaborative work. In 2001, it became clear that the Etoy architecture in Squeak had reached its limits in what the Morphic interface infrastructure could do. Andreas Raab , a researcher in Kay's group then at Hewlett-Packard, proposed defining a "script process" and providing a default scheduling mechanism that avoided several more general problems. The result
546-548: The University of California, Berkeley to start Utah's computer science department) and Ivan Sutherland (best known for writing such pioneering programs as Sketchpad ). Kay credits Sutherland's 1963 thesis for influencing his views on objects and computer programming . As he grew busier with research for the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA), he ended his musical career. In 1968, he met Seymour Papert and learned of
588-424: The University of Utah College of Engineering . He earned a Master of Science in electrical engineering in 1968, then a Doctor of Philosophy in computer science in 1969. His doctoral dissertation, FLEX: A Flexible Extendable Language , described the invention of a computer language named FLEX . While there, he worked with "fathers of computer graphics " David C. Evans (who had recently been recruited from
630-766: The World Summit on the Information Society , the MIT research laboratories unveiled a new laptop computer for educational use around the world. It has many names, including the $ 100 Laptop, the One Laptop per Child program, the Children's Machine, and the XO-1 . The program was founded and is sustained by Kay's friend Nicholas Negroponte , and is based on Kay's Dynabook ideal. Kay is a prominent co-developer of
672-431: The 1970s. The actual impact on computer science, however, was limited: Everybody was blown away and thought it was absolutely fantastic and nothing else happened. There was almost no further impact. People thought it was too far out and they were still working on their physical teletypes, hadn't even migrated to glass teletypes yet. So it sparked interest in a small vigorous research community but it didn't have impact on
714-474: The 1980s and 1990s. Much of Engelbart's thought that led to the development of his Augmentation Research Center (ARC), as well as the oN-Line System , was derived from the "research culture" of World War II and the early Cold War. A notable source of inspiration to Engelbart was the article " As We May Think ", written by Vannevar Bush in The Atlantic magazine, which Engelbart read while stationed as
756-616: The ACM SIGCSE Award for Outstanding Contributions to Computer Science Education. Computer scientist Too Many Requests If you report this error to the Wikimedia System Administrators, please include the details below. Request from 172.68.168.226 via cp1108 cp1108, Varnish XID 219956042 Upstream caches: cp1108 int Error: 429, Too Many Requests at Thu, 28 Nov 2024 07:50:39 GMT The Mother of All Demos " The Mother of All Demos "
798-632: The Institute until its closure in 2018. In 2002 Kay joined HP Labs as a senior fellow, departing when HP disbanded the Advanced Software Research Team on July 20, 2005. He has been an adjunct professor of computer science at the University of California, Los Angeles , a visiting professor at Kyoto University , and an adjunct professor at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT). Kay served on
840-555: The Macintosh and use a multi-button mouse in the same way that the Alto and the NLS system did. Engelbart's influence peaked at the conference, and he was mostly remembered throughout the 1970s and much of the 1980s as the inventor of the mouse and hypertext, famously adapted by Apple and Microsoft. On the demo's 30th anniversary in 1998, Stanford University held a major conference to celebrate Engelbart's visionary impact on computing and
882-516: The advisory board of TTI/Vanguard . In December 1995, while still at Apple, Kay collaborated with many others to start the open source Squeak version of Smalltalk . As part of this effort, in November 1996, his team began research on what became the Etoys system. More recently he started, with David A. Smith , David P. Reed , Andreas Raab , Rick McGeer, Julian Lombardi , and Mark McCahill ,
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#1732780239274924-748: The age of three, so I had read maybe 150 books by the time I hit first grade, and I already knew the teachers were lying to me. Originally from Springfield, Massachusetts , Kay's family relocated several times due to his father's career in physiology before ultimately settling in the New York metropolitan area . He attended Brooklyn Technical High School . Having accumulated enough credits to graduate, he then attended Bethany College in Bethany, West Virginia , where he majored in biology and minored in mathematics. Kay then taught guitar in Denver , Colorado for
966-412: The audience included Alan Kay , Charles Irby and Andy van Dam , as well as Bob Sproull . Engelbart, with the help of his geographically distributed team (including Bill Paxton ), with Bill English directing the presentation's technical elements, demonstrated NLS's functions. The presentation used an Eidophor video projector that allowed the video output from the NLS computer to be displayed on
1008-625: The bloated code of commercial software. On August 31, 2006, Kay's proposal to the United States National Science Foundation (NSF) was granted, funding Viewpoints Research Institute for several years. The proposal title was "STEPS Toward the Reinvention of Programming: A compact and Practical Model of Personal Computing as a Self-exploratorium". STEPS is a recursive acronym that stands for "STEPS Toward Expressive Programming Systems". A sense of what Kay
1050-582: The computer field as a whole. As the 1970s started, much of Engelbart's team departed ARC and went their own ways, with many of them ending up at the Xerox Palo Alto Research Center (PARC). Among these people were Bill English, who would further improve upon the mouse . Also migrating to PARC was Engelbart's former backer at NASA and ARPA, Robert Taylor. Alan Kay, also in attendance at the demo, would go on to design an object-oriented computing environment called Smalltalk while he
1092-477: The computer, focusing on its educational software using Squeak and Etoys. Kay has lectured extensively on the idea that the computer revolution is very new, and all of the good ideas have not been universally implemented. His lectures at the OOPSLA 1997 conference, and his ACM Turing Award talk, "The Computer Revolution Hasn't Happened Yet", were informed by his experiences with Sketchpad , Simula , Smalltalk , and
1134-418: The concept of hypertext . When he finished the demonstration, the audience gave him a standing ovation. To further demonstrate the system, a separate room was set aside so that attendees could take a closer look at the NLS workstations and ask Engelbart questions. One last notion is that of Engelbart's NLS system. As Fred Turner stated in his book From Counterculture to Cyberculture : Engelbart promulgated
1176-526: The decade, he developed prototypes of networked workstations using the programming language Smalltalk . Along with some colleagues at PARC, Kay is one of the fathers of the idea of object-oriented programming (OOP), which he named. Some original object-oriented concepts, including the use of the words 'object' and 'class', had been developed for Simula 67 at the Norwegian Computing Center . Kay said: I'm sorry that I long ago coined
1218-486: The demonstration. The live demonstration featured the introduction of a complete computer hardware and software system called the oN-Line System or, more commonly, NLS. The 90-minute presentation demonstrated for the first time many of the fundamental elements of modern personal computing : windows , hypertext , graphics , efficient navigation and command input, video conferencing , the computer mouse , word processing , dynamic file linking , revision control , and
1260-792: The early versions of the language and coining the term "object-oriented." He has been elected a Fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences , the National Academy of Engineering , and the Royal Society of Arts . He received the Turing award in 2003. In an interview on education in America with the Davis Group Ltd., Kay said: I had the misfortune or the fortune to learn how to read fluently starting about
1302-493: The idea that beyond merely performing calculations, computers could be used to augment the capabilities of the human mind. Engelbart had assembled a team of computer engineers and programmers at his Augmentation Research Center (ARC) located in Stanford University's Stanford Research Institute (SRI) in the early 1960s. His idea was to free computing from merely being about number crunching and for it to become
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1344-601: The lab and the conference hall, two microwave links were used. English also commanded a video switcher that controlled what was displayed on the big screen. The camera operator in Menlo Park was Stewart Brand , who at the time was a non-computer person, best known as the editor of the Whole Earth Catalog . Stewart Brand advised Engelbart and the team about how to present the demo. Engelbart had gotten to know Stewart Brand when they experimented with LSD at
1386-543: The programming language Logo , a dialect of Lisp optimized for educational purposes. This led him to learn of the work of Jean Piaget , Jerome Bruner , Lev Vygotsky , and of constructionist learning , further influencing his professional orientation. On December 9 of that same year he was present in San Francisco for the Mother of all Demos , a landmark computer demonstration by Douglas Engelbart . Even though he
1428-630: The same lab. During the 90-minute presentation, Engelbart used his mouse prototype to move around the screen, highlight text, and resize windows. This was the first time that an integrated system for manipulating text onscreen was presented publicly. At separate times, his Augment associates Jeff Rulifson and Bill Paxton appeared in another portion of the screen to help edit the text remotely from ARC. While they were editing they could see each other's screen, talk and see each other as well. He further demonstrated that clicking on underlined text would then link to another page of information, demonstrating
1470-459: The term "objects" for this topic because it gets many people to focus on the lesser idea. The big idea is " messaging ". While at PARC, Kay conceived the Dynabook concept, a key progenitor of laptop and tablet computers and the e-book . He is also the architect of the modern overlapping windowing graphical user interface (GUI). Because the Dynabook was conceived as an educational platform, he
1512-480: The urging of ARPA's director, Robert Taylor , the NLS would make its first public appearance at the 1968 Fall Joint Computer Conference in San Francisco 's Civic Auditorium . The conference session was presented under the title A research center for augmenting human intellect . Approximately 1,000 computer professionals were in attendance in the auditorium to witness the presentation. Notable attendees in
1554-457: The world. In its wake, scientists and technologists had begun to fan out around the globe, seeking to use their knowledge to eradicate disease and increase food production, often in an effort to win the cold war loyalties of Third World nations. Engelbart had read about these efforts and saw that they often backfired. Rapid food production led to the depletion of the soil; the eradication of insects led to ecological imbalances. This ultimately led to
1596-482: Was a landmark computer demonstration of developments by Stanford Research Institute 's Augmentation Research Center , given at the Association for Computing Machinery / Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (ACM/IEEE)—Computer Society's Fall Joint Computer Conference in San Francisco , by Douglas Engelbart , on December 9, 1968. The name The Mother of All Demos has been retroactively applied to
1638-535: Was a new user interface, proposed to replace the Squeak Morphic user interface. Tweak added mechanisms of islands, asynchronous messaging, players and costumes, language extensions, projects, and tile scripting. Its underlying object system is class-based , but to users (during programming) it acts as if it were prototype-based . Tweak objects are created and run in Tweak project windows. In November 2005, at
1680-462: Was at PARC. By 1973, the Xerox Alto was a fully functional personal computer similar to the NLS terminal which Engelbart had demonstrated in 1968, but much smaller and physically refined. With its mouse-driven GUI , the Alto would go on to influence Steve Jobs and Apple 's Macintosh computer and operating system in the 1980s. Eventually, Microsoft 's Windows operating system would follow
1722-648: Was sick with a high fever on that day, the event was very influential in Kay's career. He recalled later: "It was one of the greatest experiences in my life". In 1969, Kay became a visiting researcher at the Stanford Artificial Intelligence Laboratory in anticipation of accepting a professorship at Carnegie Mellon University . Instead, in 1970, he joined the Xerox PARC research staff in Palo Alto, California . Through
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1764-418: Was working on a similar system, but had only begun work on it in 1967, and was stunned to see how mature NLS was: he practically accosted Engelbart with his line of questioning in the post-presentation question and answer session. After he finished interrogating Engelbart, van Dam agreed the NLS demo was the greatest thing he ever witnessed. Van Dam would go on to become a leader in teaching computer graphics in
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