Alan C. Kay has been called the father of the personal computer in acknowledgment of his many contributions to the field of personal computing. His concept of the Dynabook lap-top computer was the inspiration of Alto, a forerunner of the Apple and Macintosh computers. Kay also pioneered the use of icons and windows, and his invention of Smalltalk--a very high-level, object-oriented programming language--gave children and nonprogrammers a hitherto unprecedented degree of access to computing.

Kay was a founding member of the Xerox Palo Alto Research Center (PARC) in 1970, leaving ten years later to become chief scientist at Atari, Inc. He joined the Apple Computer Company in 1984 as an Apple Fellow, a title held by a select group of scientists chartered to explore technology for Apple's future. In 1987, he shared the ACM Software Systems Award with his former colleagues Adele Goldberg and Dan Ingalls.

Born in Springfield, Massachusetts, to...