A History of Silicon Valley
This biography is an appendix to my book "A History of Silicon Valley"
Biographies
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(Copyright © 2009 Piero Scaruffi)
Alan Kay
Alan Kay (Massachusetts, 1940)
studied mathematics and biology at the University of Colorado at Boulder while
making a living as a jazz guitarist.
In 1966 he moved to the University of Utah where he studied with
Ivan Sutherland, where he was exposed to Sketchpad and Simula,
and he graduated in engineering in 1969.
He lectured at Stanford's AI Lab (SAIL) in 1969-70 and
Xerox PARC hired him in 1971 to work on
his visions of a mobile computer (that he named Dynabook),
and of "object-oriented" (a term that he invented) educational software.
He was crucial to the development of both Smalltalk and the Alto.
In 1981 he left Xerox and joined Atari's Sunnyvale Research Laboratory.
In 1984 he joined Apple, which had commercialized many of his old ideas, but
spent most of the time applying his theory of education at the Open School in West Hollywood.
In 1996 he moved to Walt Disney.
In 2001 he founded the non-profit Viewpoints Research Institute to foster
innovative educational programs.
His most famous motto is: "The best way to predict the future is to invent it."
History of Silicon Valley
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| History pages
| Editor
| Correspondence
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