Kay credits Sutherland's 1963 thesis for influencing his views on objects and computer programming. Evans (who had recently been recruited from the University of California, Berkeley to start Utah's computer science department) and Ivan Sutherland (best known for writing such pioneering programs as Sketchpad). While there, he worked with 'fathers of computer graphics' David C. His doctoral dissertation, FLEX: A Flexible Extendable Language, described the invention of a computer language named FLEX. He earned a Master of Science in electrical engineering in 1968, then a Doctor of Philosophy in computer science in 1969.

In the autumn of 1966, he began graduate school at the University of Utah College of Engineering.

He was drafted in the United States Army, then qualified for officer training in the United States Air Force, where he became a computer programmer after passing an aptitude test.Īfter his discharge, he enrolled at the University of Colorado Boulder and earned a Bachelor of Science (B.S.) in mathematics and molecular biology in 1966. Kay then taught guitar in Denver, Colorado for a year. Having accumulated enough credits to graduate, he then attended Bethany College in Bethany, West Virginia, where he majored in biology and minored in mathematics. He attended Brooklyn Technical High School. 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. I had the misfortune or the fortune to learn how to read fluently starting about the age of three, so I had read maybe 150 books by the time I hit first grade, and I already knew the teachers were lying to me. In an interview on education in America with the Davis Group Ltd., Kay said: He also is an amateur classical pipe organist.Ĭomputer scientist Alan Kay Early life and work Kay is also a former professional jazz guitarist, composer, and theatrical designer. He has been elected a Fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, the National Academy of Engineering, and the Royal Society of Arts. There he also led the development of the influential object-oriented programming language Smalltalk, both personally designing most of the early versions of the language and coining the term 'object-oriented.' At Xerox PARC he led the design and development of the first modern windowed computer desktop interface. University of Utah College of Engineering ( M.S., 1968 Ph.D., 1969)įLEX: A Flexible Extendable Language (1968)Īlan Curtis Kay (born May 17, 1940) is an American computer scientist best known for his pioneering work on object-oriented programming and windowing graphical user interface (GUI) design. University of Colorado at Boulder ( B.S., 1966)

Not Quite Human by Kaye Draper