Alan Curtis Kay (born May 17, 1940)[1] is an American computer scientist who pioneered work on object-oriented programming and windowing graphical user interface (GUI) design.

[4]Originally from Springfield, Massachusetts, Kay's family relocated several times due to his father's career in physiology before ultimately settling in the New York metropolitan area.

In 1968, he met Seymour Papert and learned of the programming language Logo, a dialect of Lisp optimized for educational purposes.

On December 9 of that same year he was present in San Francisco for the Mother of all Demos, a landmark computer demonstration by Douglas Engelbart.

[8] In 1969, Kay became a visiting researcher at the Stanford Artificial Intelligence Laboratory in anticipation of accepting a professorship at Carnegie Mellon University.

[10]While at PARC, Kay conceived the Dynabook concept, a key progenitor of laptop and tablet computers and the e-book.

He remained there until Ferren left to start Applied Minds Inc with Imagineer Danny Hillis, leading to the cessation of the Fellows program.

In 2001, Kay founded Viewpoints Research Institute, a nonprofit organization dedicated to children, learning, and advanced software development.

For their first ten years, Kay and his Viewpoints group were based at Applied Minds in Glendale, California, where he and Ferren worked on various projects.

Andreas Raab, a researcher in Kay's group then at Hewlett-Packard, proposed defining a "script process" and providing a default scheduling mechanism that avoided several more general problems.

Tweak added mechanisms of islands, asynchronous messaging, players and costumes, language extensions, projects, and tile scripting.

His lectures at the OOPSLA 1997 conference, and his ACM Turing Award talk, "The Computer Revolution Hasn't Happened Yet", were informed by his experiences with Sketchpad, Simula, Smalltalk, and the bloated code of commercial software.

On August 31, 2006, Kay's proposal to the United States National Science Foundation (NSF) was granted, funding Viewpoints Research Institute for several years.

A sense of what Kay is trying to do comes from this quote, from the abstract of a seminar at Intel Research Labs, Berkeley: "The conglomeration of commercial and most open source software consumes in the neighborhood of several hundreds of millions of lines of code these days.