Alan Kay

The industry needs shaking up, and he's just the man to do it. His latest work? Opening up the world of computing to our children.

By Stacy Cowley, ChannelWeb

9:00 AM EST Mon. Dec. 11, 2006
From the December 11, 2006 issue of CRN
Page 1 of 2

Alan Kay calls all of the pioneering work he's done in the past four decades an extension of the puzzle he first set out to explore in his graduate thesis: the challenges and opportunities of personal computing. It's not the chips and code in PCs that fascinate Kay, though he has a masterful understanding of those. It's the potential for computers to amplify the finite human brain.

Slide Show: Alan Kay

"There's an analogy to the big change that the printing press made," Kay says.

As Gutenberg invented the tools and methods for turning words into a mass medium, the 66-year-old Kay and a stable of regular collaborators invented much of what we recognize as a modern PC. At Xerox's legendary Palo Alto Research Center (PARC) in the 1970s, Kay designed Smalltalk, the first object-oriented programming language; he helped create Alto, the prototype PC whose icons, windows and point-and-click interface catalyzed the Macintosh; and he participated in the early design of ARPANet, the precursor to the Internet.

While Kay's work helped fashion the tools that built the modern IT industry, his real passion is computing for children. That's the challenge that animates his work on such recent projects as "One Laptop Per Child," better known as the "$100 Laptop" initiative; and Squeak, a modern Smalltalk implementation aimed at giving kids a tool for creating their own media and models.

Why children? In kids, Kay sees the potential for the original, intuitive leaps that spark major advances. "Children don't know the way the world is supposed to be," he says. "In all of the revolutions, it was the children who did it—usually several generations of children."

Kay would like to see the world of computing shaken afresh by a few innovation cataclysms. He says he's taken aback by how routine it has become. "In the last 25 years we went from people thinking about all this stuff very carefully to people who are not thinking about it at all, just using existing goal structures," he says. "People digitize things: accounting systems, records, photos. People are occupying themselves with imitations of old media."

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