Alan Kay

Alan Kay, a Disney Fellow and Vice-President of Research and Development at Walt Disney Imagineering, is best known for the idea of personal computing, the concept of the intimate personal laptop, and the inventions of the now-ubiquitous overlapping window interface and object-oriented programming. His deep interest in children was the catalyst for these ideas, and it continues to inspire him. Kay was one of the early leaders of Xerox PARC (Palo Alto Research Center), where he directed one of the groups that developed these ideas into modern workstations, the Smalltalk programming language, desktop publishing, the Ethernet, and laser printing. Kay has received many awards, including ACM's Software Systems Award, and the J. D. Warnier Prix d'Informatique. He is a Fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, the National Academy of Engineering, and the Royal Society of Arts. He is pictured here sitting at the custom pipe organ installed in his home.