“Everybody loves change, except for the change part,” Kay observes.
For these contributions, both the National Academy of Engineering and the Association of Computing Machinery have awarded him their highest honors. He was also a leading member of the Xerox PARC community that actualized those concepts and integrated them with other seminal developments, including the Ethernet, laser printing, modern word processing, client-servers and peer-peer networking. Technology companies and many others in downstream industries have collectively realized trillions of dollars in revenues and tens of trillions in market value because of them.Īlan Kay made several fundamental contributions, including personal computers, object-oriented programming, and graphical user interfaces. Four decades later, most of the information-technology industry and much of global commerce depends on this community’s inventions. Kay was a ringleader of the exceptional group of ARPA-inspired scientists and engineers that created an entire genre of personal computing and pervasive world-wide networking.
