麻豆影院

Who is CU-麻豆影院鈥檚 most influential alum? Unless you follow the computer industry, chances are you鈥檝e never heard of him.

His name is聽Alan Kay聽(Bio, Math鈥�66).

Measured against the metrics of how many lives he鈥檚 touched and changed (hundreds of millions and counting), Kay is probably CU鈥檚 most influential alumnus of all time.

He is one of the giants of personal computing. He almost single-handedly defined the personal computer as we know it.

Do you use an Apple Macintosh or Microsoft Windows personal computer, or any other computer that uses windows, pull-down menus and a mouse to execute point-and-click commands 鈥� in other words a computer with a 鈥済raphical user interface?鈥�

Kay, along with his colleagues at Xerox鈥檚 Palo Alto Research Center (PARC), invented the graphical user interface. It first appeared on an experimental computer called the Alto. Steve Jobs based the Macintosh on it. Bill Gates based Microsoft Windows on it. Today it is used on hundreds of millions of computers all over the world. Most people have never encountered a computer without it.

And that鈥檚 not half of what Kay has done. He worked on ARPANET, the predecessor of the Internet. He wrote some of the first object-oriented computer languages, which revolutionized programming.

And then there鈥檚 the Dynabook.

Do you use a laptop or a tablet computer? The Dynabook concept was the daddy of both of them, even though it was never built.

Kay thought it up in the late 1960s and introduced it to the world in 1972, in a stunningly prescient paper titled 鈥淎 Personal Computer for Children of All Ages.鈥�

It looked like an iPad-sized version of a Blackberry smartphone. Kay conceived it primarily with children in mind; he believed (and still believes) a children鈥檚 computer, if properly designed and used, would revolutionize education.

鈥淭he best way to predict the future is to invent it,鈥� Kay says.

Has the iPad and the host of other laptop and tablet computers turned his vision of the Dynabook into reality?

Not even close, he says.

He鈥檚 offended that iPads and iPhones don鈥檛 allow children to download 鈥淓toys鈥� 鈥� software toys made by another child somewhere in the world 鈥� because the heart and soul of the Dynabook was to allow children to educate themselves by using their computers to discover, create and share.

In 2001 Kay started his own research institute, the Viewpoints Research Institute, where he鈥檚 pursuing his most revolutionary unrealized ideas, including creating Dynabook-like $100 tablets and putting them in the hands of every child in the world, especially the developing world.

One of Kay鈥檚 more memorable quotes 鈥� and my favorite 鈥� is:

鈥淚f you don鈥檛 fail at least 90 percent of the time, you鈥檙e not aiming high enough.

Paul Danish (Hist'65) never has completely grown up. Unsurprisingly, he has a Dynabook at the top of his bucket list.

Illustration by Alan Kay