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For his fundamental contributions to personal computing and human interface development; co-founder Xerox PARC.
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Alan Kay, a Disney Fellow and Vice President of Research and Development for the Walt Disney Company, is best known for the idea of personal computing, the concept of the intimate laptop computer, and the inventions of the now ubiquitous overlapping-window interface and modern 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 founders of the Xerox Palo Alto Research Center (PARC), where he led one of the groups that in concert developed those ideas into modern workstations (and the forerunner of the Macintosh), the Smalltalk computer language, the overlapping-window interface, desktop publishing, the Ethernet, laser printing, and network "client servers".
Kay has received many awards, including ACM's Softwware 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.