The Clear Romantic Visionary

"All understanding begins with our not accepting the world as it appears." 
-Alan C. Kay

For Alan Kay, it all started with a 1945 article in the Atlantic Monthly about Vannevar Bush's proto-computer called the differential analyzer. Kay, born 1940 in Springfield, Massachusetts, was brilliant from the very beginning having learned to read early and having read a few hundred books by the time he started school. This brilliance, and a lot of opportunity, got Kay to Brooklyn Technical High School, then Bethany College in West Virginia, and then the Air Force. By 1961, he worked as a programmer for the Air Force where he had the chance to work with data in independent procedure bundles that only had to keep track of the data that was relevant to the bundle. "The idea that a program could use procedures without knowing how the data was represented struck Kay as a good one," and he later followed up on the concept with his work on objects and object orientation. In 1962, he left the Air Force and matriculated into the mathematics department at the University of Colorado, which he graduated by 1966 with a double major in mathematics and molecular biology. Then, Kay finally decided to try computer science, so he went to the University of Utah and started working on his PhD in computer science there. At Utah, his search for a way to implement powerful, intricate, and very involved systems from simple building blocks has begun. Can a program support a bunch of instances of an object that conformed all the behavior described in a master set? Can these instances be different? How would the programmer differentiate between them? How would message be passed between the instances and to the controller cells? "The ability to start with an idea and see it through to a correct and efficient program is one prerequisite for a great software designer," and Kay certainly proved that he was one with his formulation of object orientation, an answer to all the questions above as posed by Kay himself (46). While object-oriented programming, the most famous concept of computing, may embody Kay's legacy, Kay's work in education is his real contribution to the world. From the Vivarium to the Dynabook to the $100 computer, the classroom has been single-handedly transformed, and in the lives and education of so many children in the United States Kay has made a difference.