Alan Kay
b. 1940
computer scientist · designer
The computer as medium, not tool
Alan Kay's central and recurring idea is that the computer is the first metamedium, a medium that can simulate any other medium, and invent new ones. Most people never see this. They use computers as faster typewriters or more efficient filing systems. Kay kept asking what no previous medium could do.
Smalltalk and the object
At Xerox PARC in the early 1970s, Kay and his Learning Research Group built Smalltalk, a language in which everything is an object and everything happens by sending messages. The design was partly an implementation philosophy and partly an educational one. Kay wanted children to be able to program their own media.
The object metaphor has been distorted beyond recognition in most modern languages, but the original form had a biological intuition: a system of many autonomous agents, each processing messages in its own way, with no global state.
The Dynabook
Kay's most influential unbuilt thing is the Dynabook, a portable computer for children, sketched in 1968, designed to be a personal dynamic medium. It never shipped. But the laptop is its shadow, the iPad is a partial shadow, and the idea of personal computing as literacy is Kay's idea.
"The best way to predict the future is to invent it."
He has spent fifty years trying to.