GUI Pioneer & Former Apple Fellow Alan Kay Goes To HP

by , 11:00 AM EST, November 26th, 2002

Mac historians take note: Xerox PARC veteran and long-time Apple Fellow Alan Kay has taken a new position with HP, according to a report from the Dow Jones Business Wire. Mr. Kay was part of the team at the Xerox PARC that developed the first GUI that inspired first Jef Raskin, and then Steve Jobs, to take the concept commercial. The result was the Mac.

Mr. Kay became an Apple Fellow in 1984, the year the Mac was released, where his job was to perform research. He eventually left Apple and became a Disney Fellow and Vice President of Research and Development at Walt Disney Imagineering. He is credited with helping to develop object oriented programming, ethernet, laser printers, and portable computers. According to the Dow Jones report, Mr. Kay will be working on new research projects for HP. From the article:

Mr. Kay, 62 years old, will join as senior fellow of H-P Labs, where he will explore how to apply computing to new markets and develop software platforms for devices based on "open source" code, a term for programs for which the underlying computing instructions are freely available.

Mr. Kay said he was approached by H-P about joining the computer-and-printer maker several months ago when he was looking for a donation to his nonprofit educational organization, Viewpoints Research Institute in Glendale, Calif.

You can read the full Dow Jones article at Yahoo!'s Web site.

The Mac Observer Spin:

Mr. Kay is one of those rare people around whom the rest of the world pivoted, even if we didn't know it at the time. His work in the 1970s at the Xerox PARC has continued to reverberate into today's computer industry, and many of the things we take for granted stem from that work.