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Alan Kay is one of the earliest pioneers of object-oriented programming, personal computing, and graphical user interfaces. His contributions been recognized with the Charles Stark Draper Prize of the National Academy of Engineering1 for the vision, conception, and development of the first practical networked personal computers, the Alan. M. Turing Award from the Association of Computing Machinery for pioneering many of the ideas at the root of contemporary object-oriented programming languages, leading the team that developed Smalltalk, and for fundamental contributions to personal computing, and the Kyoto Prize from the Inamori Foundation for creation of the concept of modern personal computing and contribution to its realization. This work was done in the rich context of ARPA and Xerox PARC with many talented colleagues. While at the ARPA project at the University of Utah in the late 60s, he invented dynamic object-oriented programming2, was part of the original team that developed continuous tone 3D graphics, was the co-designer of the FLEX Machine3, an early desktop computer with graphical user interface and object-oriented operating system, participated in the design of the ARPAnet, and inspired by children4, conceived the Dynabook, a laptop personal computer for children of all ages,. At Xerox PARC he invented Smalltalk, the first completely object-oriented programming, authoring and operating system (which included the now ubiquitous overlapping window interface), instigated the bitmap screen, screen painting and animation, participated in desktop publishing, other desktop media, and the development of the Alto, the first modern networked personal computer. This was part of the larger process at PARC that created an entire genre of personal computing including: the GUI, Ethernet, Laser-printing, modern word processing, client-servers and peer-peer networking.
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