Alan Curtis Kay
Born	(1940-05-17) May 17, 1940 (age 72)
Citizenship	United States
Fields	Computer science
Institutions	Xerox PARC Stanford University Atari Apple Inc. ATG Walt Disney Imagineering UCLA Kyoto University MIT Viewpoints Research Institute Hewlett-Packard Labs
Alma mater	University of Colorado at Boulder, University of Utah
Known for	Dynabook object-oriented programming Smalltalk graphical user interface windows
Notable awards	ACM Turing Award, Kyoto Prize, Charles Stark Draper Prize
Spouse	Bonnie MacBird

Alan Curtis Kay (born May 17, 1940) is an American computer scientist, known for his early pioneering work on object-oriented programming and windowing graphical user interface design, and for coining the phrase, "The best way to predict the future is to invent it."

He is the president of the Viewpoints Research Institute, and an Adjunct Professor of Computer Science at the University of California, Los Angeles. He is also on the advisory board of TTI/Vanguard. Until mid 2005, he was a Senior Fellow at HP Labs, a Visiting Professor at Kyoto University, and an Adjunct Professor at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT).^[1]

Early life and work[link]

Alan Kay showed remarkable ability at an early age, learning to read fluently at three years old. In an interview on education in America with the Davis Group Ltd. Alan Kay said, "I had the fortune or misfortune to learn how to read fluently starting at the age of three. So I had read maybe 150 books by the time I hit 1st grade. And I already knew that the teachers were lying to me."^[2]

Originally from Springfield, Massachusetts, Kay attended the University of Colorado at Boulder, earning a Bachelor's degree in Mathematics and Molecular Biology. Before and during this time, he worked as a professional jazz guitarist.

In 1966, he began graduate school at the University of Utah College of Engineering, earning a Master's degree and a Ph.D. degree. There, he worked with Ivan Sutherland, who had done pioneering graphics programs including Sketchpad. This greatly inspired Kay's evolving views on objects and programming. As he grew busier with ARPA research, he quit his career as a professional musician.

In 1968, he met Seymour Papert and learned of the Logo programming language, a dialect of Lisp optimized for educational use. This led him to learn of the work of Jean Piaget, Jerome Bruner, Lev Vygotsky, and of Constructionist learning. These further influenced his views.

In 1970, Kay joined Xerox Corporation's Palo Alto Research Center, PARC. In the 1970s he was one of the key members there to develop prototypes of networked workstations using the programming language Smalltalk. These inventions were later commercialized by Apple Computer in their Lisa and Macintosh computers.

Kay is one of the fathers of the idea of object-oriented programming, which he named, along with some colleagues at PARC and predecessors at the Norwegian Computing Center. He conceived the Dynabook concept which defined the conceptual basics for laptop and tablet computers and E-books, and is the architect of the modern overlapping windowing graphical user interface (GUI).^[3] Because the Dynabook was conceived as an educational platform, Kay is considered to be one of the first researchers into mobile learning, and indeed, 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.

After 10 years at Xerox PARC, Kay became Atari's chief scientist for three years.

Recent work and recognition[link]

Starting in 1984, Kay was an Apple Fellow at Apple Computer until the closing of the ATG (Advanced Technology Group), one of the company's R&D divisions.^[4] He then joined Walt Disney Imagineering as a Disney Fellow and remained there until Disney ended its Disney Fellow program. After Disney, in 2001 he founded Viewpoints Research Institute, a non-profit organization dedicated to children, learning, and advanced software development.

Later, Kay worked with a team at Applied Minds, then became a Senior Fellow at Hewlett-Packard until HP disbanded the Advanced Software Research Team on July 20, 2005. He is currently head of Viewpoints Institute.

Kay taught a Fall 2011 class, "Powerful Ideas: Useful Tools to Understand the World", at NYU's Interactive Telecommunications Program (ITP) along with full-time ITP faculty member Nancy Hechinger. The goal of the class was to devise new forms of teaching/learning based on fundamental, powerful concepts - rather than on traditional rote learning.^[5]

Squeak, Etoys, and Croquet[link]

In December 1995, when he was still at Apple, Kay collaborated with many others to start the open source Squeak version of Smalltalk, and he continues to work on it. As part of this effort, in November 1996, his team began research on what became the Etoys system. More recently he started, along with David A. Smith, David P. Reed, Andreas Raab, Rick McGeer, Julian Lombardi, and Mark McCahill, the Croquet Project, which is an open source networked 2D and 3D environment for collaborative work.

Tweak[link]

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 was a researcher working in Kay's group, then at Hewlett-Packard. He proposed defining a "script process" and providing a default scheduling mechanism that avoids several more general problems.^[6] The result was a new user interface, proposed to replace the Squeak Morphic user interface in the future. Tweak added mechanisms of islands, asynchronous messaging, players and costumes, language extensions, projects, and tile scripting.^[7] Its underlying object system is class-based, but to users (during programming) it acts like it is prototype-based. Tweak objects are created and run in Tweak project windows.

Children's Machine[link]

In November 2005, at 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: the $100 Laptop, the One Laptop per Child program, the Children's Machine, and the XO-1. The program was begun and is sustained by Kay's friend, Nicholas Negroponte, and is based on Kay's Dynabook ideal. Kay is a prominent co-developer of the computer, focusing on its educational software using Squeak and Etoys.

Reinventing programming[link]

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. Lectures at OOPSLA 1997 conference and his ACM Turing award talk, entitled "The Computer Revolution Hasn't Happened Yet" were informed by his experiences with Sketchpad, Simula, Smalltalk, and the bloated code of commercial software.

On August 31, 2006, Kay's proposal to the United States National Science Foundation (NSF) was granted, thus 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.^[8] A sense of what Kay is trying to do comes from this quote, from the abstract of a seminar on this given 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?"^[9]

Awards and honors[link]

Alan Kay has received many awards and honors. Among them:

• 2001: UdK 01-Award in Berlin, Germany for pioneering the GUI;^[10] J-D Warnier Prix D'Informatique; NEC C&C Prize
• 2002: Telluride Tech Festival Award of Technology in Telluride, Colorado
• 2003: ACM Turing Award for work on object-oriented programming
• 2004: Kyoto Prize; Charles Stark Draper Prize with Butler W. Lampson, Robert W. Taylor and Charles P. Thacker^[11]
• Honorary doctorates:
  • 2002: Kungliga Tekniska Högskolan (Royal Institute of Technology) in Stockholm^[12]
  • 2005: Georgia Institute of Technology^[13]
  • 2005: Columbia College Chicago^[14]
  • 2007: Laurea Honoris Causa in Informatica, Università di Pisa, Italy
  • 2008: University of Waterloo^[15]
  • 2010: Universidad de Murcia^[16]
• Honorary Professor, Berlin University of the Arts
• Elected fellow of:
  • American Academy of Arts and Sciences
  • National Academy of Engineering
  • Royal Society of Arts
  • 1999: Computer History Museum^[17]
  • 2008: Association for Computing Machinery^[18]
  • 2011: Hasso-Plattner-Institut^[19][20]

Other honors: J-D Warnier Prix d’Informatique, ACM Systems Software Award, NEC Computers & Communication Foundation Prize, Funai Foundation Prize, Lewis Branscomb Technology Award, ACM SIGCSE Award for Outstanding Contributions to Computer Science Education.

References[link]

Articles[link]

• "Computers, Networks and Education" - Scientific American Special Issue on Communications, Computers, and Networks, September, 1991. [1]

External links[link]

This article's use of external links may not follow Wikipedia's policies or guidelines. Please improve this article by removing excessive or inappropriate external links, and converting useful links where appropriate into footnote references. (April 2011)

Find more about Alan Kay on Wikipedia's sister projects:
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	Quotations from Wikiquote
	Source texts from Wikisource
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• TED Talks: Alan Kay shares a powerful idea about ideas at TED in 2007
• Alan Kay biography
• Detailed Alan Kay bibliography
• Personal Dynamic Media – By Alan Kay and Adele Goldberg
• Doing with Images Makes Symbols: Communicating with Computers Video lecture by Alan Kay with lots of examples of early graphic user interfaces
• The Computer "Revolution" Hasn't Happened Yet! talk at EDUCOM 1998 (computers in education)
• Predicting the Future remarks from 1989 Stanford Computer Forum
• Education in the Digital Age talk
• A Conversation with Alan Kay Big talk with the creator of Smalltalk—and much more.
• From Dynabook to Squeak - A Study in Survivals list of links tracing the evolution of Kay's vision
• The Early History of Smalltalk
• The Best Way to Predict the Future is to Prevent It
• The $100 Laptop, Learners, and Powerful Ideas
• Association for Computing Machinery Video Interview with Alan Kay
• Turing Award lecture: "The Computer Revolution Hasn't Happened Yet"
• Diamond Management and Technology Consultants , where Alan is a board member.
• Viewpoints Research Institute
• Transcript: The Computer Revolution Hasn't Happened Yet, OOPSLA 1997
• Alan Kay's Viewpoints from Black and White Program
• Alan Kay on Education (His comments on Mark Guzdial Blog)
• Alan Kay's Reading List

Ivan Edward Sutherland
Born	(1938-05-16) May 16, 1938 (age 74) Hastings, Nebraska, United States
Fields	Computer science Internet
Institutions	Harvard University University of Utah Evans and Sutherland California Institute of Technology Carnegie Mellon University Sun Microsystems Portland State University
Alma mater	MIT Caltech Carnegie Mellon
Doctoral advisor	Claude Shannon
Known for	Sketchpad, considered by many to be the creator of Computer Graphics
Notable awards	Turing Award, IEEE John von Neumann Medal, Association for Computing Machinery Fellow, National Academy of Engineering member, National Academy of Sciences member

Ivan Edward Sutherland (born May 16, 1938)^[1] is an American computer scientist and Internet pioneer. He received the Turing Award from the Association for Computing Machinery in 1988 for the invention of Sketchpad, an early predecessor to the sort of graphical user interface that has become ubiquitous in personal computers. He is a member of the National Academy of Engineering, as well as the National Academy of Sciences among many other major awards.

Biography[link]

Sutherland earned his Bachelor's degree in electrical engineering from the Carnegie Institute of Technology (now Carnegie Mellon University), his Master's degree from Caltech, and his Ph.D. from MIT in EECS in 1963.

He invented Sketchpad, an innovative program that influenced alternative forms of interaction with computers. Sketchpad could accept constraints and specified relationships among segments and arcs, including the diameter of arcs. It could draw both horizontal and vertical lines and combine them into figures and shapes. Figures could be copied, moved, rotated, or resized, retaining their basic properties. Sketchpad also had the first window-drawing program and clipping algorithm, which allowed zooming. Sketchpad ran on the Lincoln TX-2 computer and influenced Douglas Engelbart's oN-Line System. Sketchpad, in turn, was influenced by the conceptual Memex as envisioned by Vannevar Bush in his influential paper "As We May Think".

Sutherland replaced J. C. R. Licklider as the head of the US Defense Department Advanced Research Project Agency's Information Processing Techniques Office (IPTO), when Licklider returned to MIT in 1964.^[2][3]

From 1965 to 1968, Sutherland was an Associate Professor of Electrical Engineering at Harvard University. Work with student Danny Cohen in 1967 lead to the development of the Cohen–Sutherland computer graphics line clipping algorithm. In 1968, with the help of his student Bob Sproull, he created the first virtual reality and augmented reality head-mounted display system, named The Sword of Damocles.

From 1968 to 1974, Sutherland was a professor at the University of Utah. Among his students there were Alan Kay, inventor of the Smalltalk language, Henri Gouraud who devised the Gouraud shading technique, Frank Crow, who went on to develop antialiasing methods, and Edwin Catmull, computer graphics scientist, co-founder of Pixar and now President of Walt Disney and Pixar Animation Studios.

In 1968 he co-founded Evans and Sutherland with his friend and colleague David C. Evans. The company has done pioneering work in the field of real-time hardware, accelerated 3D computer graphics, and printer languages. Former employees of Evans and Sutherland included the future founders of Adobe (John Warnock) and Silicon Graphics (Jim Clark).

From 1974 to 1978 he was the Fletcher Jones Professor of Computer Science at California Institute of Technology, where he was the founding head of that school's Computer Science department. He then founded a consulting firm, Sutherland, Sproull and Associates, which was purchased by Sun Microsystems to form the seed of its research division, Sun Labs.

Sutherland was a Fellow and Vice President at Sun Microsystems. Sutherland was a visiting scholar in the Computer Science Division at University of California, Berkeley (Fall 2005–Spring 2008). On May 28, 2006, Ivan Sutherland married Marly Roncken. Sutherland and Marly Roncken are leading the research in Asynchronous Systems at Portland State University.^[4]

He has two children, Juliet and Dean, and four grandchildren, Belle, Robert, William and Rose. Ivan's elder brother, Bert Sutherland, is also a prominent computer science researcher.

Awards[link]

• Computer History Museum Fellow, 2005^[5]
• R&D 100 Award, 2004 (team)^[6]
• IEEE John von Neumann Medal, 1998^[7]
• The Franklin Institute's Certificate of Merit, 1996
• Association for Computing Machinery Fellow, 1994^[8]
• Electronic Frontier Foundation EFF Pioneer Award, 1994^[9]
• ACM Software System Award, 1993^[10]
• Turing Award, 1988^[11]
• Computerworld Honors Program, Leadership Award, 1987^[12]
• IEEE Emanuel R. Piore Award, 1986^[13]
• Member, United States National Academy of Sciences, 1978^[14]
• National Academy of Engineering member, 1973^[15]
• National Academy of Engineering First Zworykin Award, 1972

Quotes[link]

This biographical section of an article needs additional citations for verification. Please help by adding reliable sources. Contentious material about living persons that is unsourced or poorly sourced must be removed immediately, especially if potentially libelous or harmful. (April 2011)

• "A display connected to a digital computer gives us a chance to gain familiarity with concepts not realizable in the physical world. It is a looking glass into a mathematical wonderland."^[16]
• "The ultimate display would, of course, be a room within which the computer can control the existence of matter. A chair displayed in such a room would be good enough to sit in. Handcuffs displayed in such a room would be confining, and a bullet displayed in such a room would be fatal."^[16]
• When asked, "How could you possibly have done the first interactive graphics program, the first non-procedural programming language, the first object oriented software system, all in one year?" Ivan replied: "Well, I didn't know it was hard."^[17]
• “It’s not an idea until you write it down.”
• "Without the fun, none of us would go on!"^[18]

Patents[link]

Sutherland has more than 60 patents, including:

• US Patent 7,636,361 (2009) Apparatus and method for high-throughput asynchronous communication with flow control
• US Patent 7,417,993 (2008) Apparatus and method for high-throughput asynchronous communication
• US Patent 7,384,804 (2008) Method and apparatus for electronically aligning capacitively coupled mini-bars
• US patent 3,889,107 (1975) System of polygon sorting by dissection
• US patent 3,816,726 (1974) Computer Graphics Clipping System for Polygons
• US patent 3,732,557 (1973) Incremental Position-Indicating System
• US patent 3,684,876 (1972) Vector Computing System as for use in a Matrix Computer
• US patent 3,639,736 (1972) Display Windowing by Clipping

References[link]

Publications and external links[link]

• SketchPad, 2004 from "CAD software – history of CAD CAM" by CADAZZ
• Sutherland's 1963 Ph.D. Thesis from Massachusetts Institute of Technology republished in 2003 by University of Cambridge as Technical Report Number 574, Sketchpad, A Man-Machine Graphical Communication System. His thesis supervisor was Claude Shannon, father of information theory.
• Duchess Chips for Process-Specific Wire Capacitance Characterization, The, by Jon Lexau, Jonathan Gainsley, Ann Coulthard and Ivan E. Sutherland, Sun Microsystems Laboratories Report Number TR-2001-100, October 2001
• Technology And Courage by Ivan Sutherland, Sun Microsystems Laboratories Perspectives Essay Series, Perspectives-96-1 (April 1996)
• Biography, "Ivan Sutherland" circa 1996, hosted by the Georgia Institute of Technology College of Computing
• Counterflow Pipeline Processor Architecture, by Ivan E. Sutherland, Charles E. Molnar (Charles Molnar), and Robert F. Sproull (Bob Sproull), Sun Microsystems Laboratories Report Number TR-94-25, April 1994
• Oral history interview with Ivan Sutherland at Charles Babbage Institute, University of Minnesota, Minneapolis. Sutherland describes his tenure as head of the Information Processing Techniques Office (IPTO) from 1963 to 1965. He discusses the existing programs as established by J. C. R. Licklider and the new initiatives started while he was there: projects in graphics and networking, the ILLIAC IV, and the Macromodule program.

This article includes a list of references, related reading or external links, but its sources remain unclear because it lacks inline citations. Please improve this article by introducing more precise citations. (December 2008)

Justin Rattner is an Intel Senior Fellow, Corporate Vice President and director of Intel Labs. He also serves as the corporation's chief technology officer (CTO). He is responsible for leading Intel's microprocessor, communications and systems technology labs and Intel Research.

In 1989, Rattner was named Scientist of the Year by R&D Magazine for his leadership in parallel and distributed computer architecture. In December 1996, Rattner was featured as Person of the Week by ABC World News for his visionary work on the Department of Energy ASCI Red System, the first computer to sustain one trillion operations per second (one teraFLOPS) and the fastest computer in the world between 1996 and 2000. In 1997, Rattner was honored as one of the Computing 200, the 200 individuals having the greatest impact on the U.S. computer industry today, and subsequently profiled in the book Wizards and Their Wonders from ACM Press.

Rattner has received two Intel Achievement Awards for his work in high performance computing and advanced cluster communication architecture. He is a longstanding member of Intel's Research Council and Academic Advisory Council. He currently serves as the Intel executive sponsor for Cornell University where he serves on the External Advisory Board for the College of Engineering. Rattner joined Intel in 1973. He was named its first Principal Engineer in 1979 and its fourth Intel Fellow in 1988.

Prior to joining Intel, Rattner held positions with Hewlett-Packard Company and Xerox Corporation. He received bachelor's and master's degrees from Cornell University in Electrical Engineering and Computer Science in 1970 and 1972, respectively.

Rattner lives near Portland, OR with his wife and three children.

Honors/Achievements[link]

• ABC World News Person of the Week, December 1996
• World's Fastest Computers 1996-2000
• R&D Magazine Scientist of the Year 1989
• Received two Intel Achievement Awards

Patents[link]

• 4,803,622, Programmable I/O sequencer for use in an I/O processor, 2/7/1989
• 4,402,046, Interprocessor communication system, 8/30/1983
• 4,387,427, Hardware scheduler/dispatcher for data processing system, 6/7/1983
• 4,325,120, Data processing system, 4/13/1982

Quotes[link]

• "Imagine a phone that can translate languages in real time…, or finding a photo of your children playing with a pet from among thousands of photos… To deliver these capabilities in products that are easy to use and attractive to many people requires that we, as an industry, rethink our approach to platform development." - Spring 2005 Intel IDF

External links[link]

• Justin Rattner's Blog on ZDNet
• Biography as given by Intel.com
• Wizards and Their Wonders on Amazon.com

Most of this information was taken from the Intel website (see external links)

Brian David Johnson (born January 8, 1968 in Oakland, California) is a retired Major League Baseball catcher and former quarterback for Stanford University.

Early life[link]

Johnson attended Skyline High School (Oakland, California) from 1983 to 1986, where he was a three-sport varsity letterman. As a catcher and pitcher for the Titans, Johnson tied one national record and broke six state records while being selected as an All-American. Johnson was the starting quarterback during all three of his years at Skyline. In addition, he was the backup to Gary Payton on Skyline's varsity basketball team. Johnson was named the California Athlete of the Year by Cal-Hi Sports three times. Brian was also the bat boy and later played for the Oakland Horsehide softball club during the 1980s.

Career at Stanford University[link]

Johnson earned a full scholarship to play quarterback for Stanford University. He was the starting quarterback during parts of his first 3 seasons. Johnson also played for the Cardinal's baseball team where he played seven different positions (all but catcher and second base) helping the team win two College World Series championships.

Major League Baseball career[link]

After his junior year at Stanford, Johnson was drafted by the New York Yankees in the 16th round (413th overall) of the 1989 MLB Draft. Although Johnson hadn't played catcher since high school, that was the position he was destined for during his professional baseball career. Johnson played for six different ballclubs during his career: the San Diego Padres (1994-1996), Detroit Tigers (1997), San Francisco Giants (1997-1998), Cincinnati Reds (1999), Kansas City Royals (2000) and Los Angeles Dodgers (2001). He made his Major League Baseball debut on April 4, 1994, and played his final game on September 21, 2001.

The "Brian Johnson game"[link]

A notable moment in Johnson's professional baseball career came on September 18, 1997, when he hit a home run in the bottom of the 12th inning against the Los Angeles Dodgers to move the San Francisco Giants into a tie with the Dodgers for first place.^[1] The Giants went on to win the National League West, and from then on, the game would be remembered among Giants fans as the "Brian Johnson game".^[2]

External links[link]

• Career statistics and player information from Baseball-Reference, or Baseball-Reference (Minors)

References[link]

• The Pride of two cities