Alan Kay

Alan Kay is an American computer scientist whose work helped shape object-oriented programming, personal computing, and the Smalltalk language.

Adele Goldberg: A computer scientist who helped develop Smalltalk and its educational materials at Xerox PARC. Goldberg collaborated with Kay on Smalltalk’s design and helped explain its programming model.
Smalltalk: A family of programming languages and environments built around objects and interactive development. Kay’s team created Smalltalk as a practical expression of object-oriented programming.
Sketchpad: Ivan Sutherland’s interactive computer graphics system, developed as a 1963 doctoral project. Sketchpad demonstrated graphical interaction that influenced Kay’s ideas about personal computing.
Graphical user interface: A user interface that represents information and actions through visual elements and pointing interactions. Kay’s work helped advance the interactive graphical environments that became standard personal-computer interfaces.
Mainframe computer: A large centralized computer designed to serve many users and intensive workloads. Kay’s personal-computer vision shifted computing away from shared centralized machines.
Dan Ingalls: A computer scientist who implemented major versions of Smalltalk at Xerox PARC. Ingalls translated Kay’s object-oriented ideas into working Smalltalk systems.
Object-oriented programming: A programming approach that organizes software around objects combining state and behavior. Kay helped develop this approach, especially its message-passing and modularity principles.
Flex machine: A personal computer prototype designed by Alan Kay and built at Xerox PARC. The Flex machine was an early test of Kay’s object-oriented personal-computer ideas.
Apple Lisa: An Apple personal computer released in 1983 with a graphical interface and mouse. Lisa’s interface reflected ideas developed at Xerox PARC, where Kay worked.
Time-sharing: A computing method that lets many users interact with one computer through allocated time slices. Kay favored powerful personal machines over dependence on terminals connected to shared computers.

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Xerox AltoRelated: Kay's Dynabook vision helped frame the Alto as a computer for individual use.