Alan Kay

Alan Kay was born in 1940 in Springfield, Massachusetts. He learned to read at age three and excelled academically. While earning his bachelor’s, master’s, and doctoral degrees, Kay worked as a professional jazz guitarist. He then started working as a programmer, joining Xerox Corporation’s Palo Alto Research Center and helping them develop key programming inventions that were later commercialized by Apple. Kay is best known for inventing object-oriented programming. Kay has also worked for Apple, Atari, Walt Disney Imagineering, Hewlett-Packard, and the Viewpoints Institute, and as a professor at MIT and Kyoto University. He has received numerous awards and several honorary doctorates.