Kay, Alan

Kay, Alan

(born 1940, Springfield, Mass., U.S.) U.S. computer scientist. He received a Ph.D. from the University of Utah. In 1972 he joined Xerox's Palo Alto Research Center and continued work on the first object-oriented programming language (Smalltalk) for educational applications. He contributed to the development of Ethernet, laser printing, and client-server architecture. He left Xerox in 1983 and became a fellow at Apple Computer, Inc. (now Apple Inc.), in 1984. His design of a graphical user interface was used in Apple's Macintosh and later in Microsoft's Windows operating system. He was a fellow at the Walt Disney Co. (1996–2001) and the Hewlett-Packard Co. (from 2002).