This is a wiki for collecting and understanding computer pioneer Alan Kay's research, including the personal computer and the advancement of humanity. Feel free to edit these pages by logging in on the top right.

You may not know Alan Kay's name, but if you're reading this on a computer or mobile device, you're touching technology directly influenced by his work. Kay is one of the major contributors to the idea of the personal computer. In popular history, Adele Goldberg and Dan Ingalls showed the work of Alan's group at Xerox PARC in the 1970s during a famous demonstration to Steve Jobs that inspired the user interface for the Macintosh. This became the common interface for most contemporary software.

But Kay's research goes far beyond this contribution. His research spans ideas about learning and education, user interfaces, software engineering, media theory, computer programming, human perception, art, science, democracy, biology, and more. This wiki exists to collect these ideas and make them accessible to those who would benefit from them.

Kay's published work consists of:

Videos

Writing

Concepts

We did our best to comprehensively collect every work available on the internet but inevitably missed some things. If you find something that's not on our list, please feel free to add it by clicking the "edit" button in the top right corner of any page. You can also see a Matthias Müller-Prove's collection of Alan Kay media for a more up-to-date collection.

We also created short selections of media categorized by topic below.

Computer Programming and Media

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Alan Kay and his collaborators have made Smalltalk, Squeak, eToys, contributions to the One Laptop Per Child program, and several inventions as part of the STEPs Reinventing Programming group.

• Personal Dynamic Media (1977, 12 pages) — Kay and collaborator Adele Goldberg summarize their research on dynamic media in the 1970s and show examples of the kinds of things their users were able to do with their Smalltalk computing environment.
• The Early History of Smalltalk (1993, 50 pages) ****— Kay gives a detailed account of the influences and events that lead to the various versions of Smalltalk invented and developed at Xerox PARC in the 1970s.
• Steps Toward the Reinvention of Programming (2012, 52 pages) — A summary of the NSF-funded project Kay lead to reinvent programming in drastically fewer lines of code than today's systems.
• Programming and Scaling (50 minutes) — In this dizzying talk to a computer science audience, Kay describes his dreams of robust software systems, and why today's systems have fallen flat as engineering projects.

Education

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