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HOME/PEOPLE/ALAN KAY
// PERSON

Alan Kay

ROLE COMPUTING PIONEERMENTIONS 2LAST SEEN JULY 2, 2026
// BIO

Alan Curtis Kay is an American computer scientist who serves as an adjunct professor of computer science at UCLA Samueli School of Engineering. He is best known for pioneering object-oriented programming and leading the development of the Smalltalk programming language at Xerox PARC, where he also conceived the Dynabook concept and designed the modern overlapping windowing graphical user interface. He received the ACM A.M. Turing Award in 2003 and the Kyoto Prize for his fundamental contributions to personal computing. He previously served as president of Viewpoints Research Institute, a nonprofit dedicated to children's education and advanced software development, until its closure in 2018.

Discussed in
// RECENT MENTIONS
// SIGNALS
2 SIGNALS
01
mention·Sourcery·JULY 2, 2026

Alan Kay is awesome. And there's many other HCI and sort of design thinkers that I also think are incredible looking back. But also I think that we need to get back to the sort of work that was done back by, you know, sort of 60s through 80s timeframe in terms of just what are the fundamental ways to think about using a computer in the first place?

Source
02
mention·Long Strange Trip w Brian Halligan·MAY 21, 2026

If we ask people who Douglas Engelbart or Alan Kay, those computing pioneers are, most people in tech have no idea... Tech is like industry doesn't know its past.

Source

AI-extracted from podcast / newsletter / paper summaries. May contain errors.