HP Fires Father of OOP 697
An anonymous reader writes "Wow. Hewlett-Packard has disbanded its Advanced Software Research team and sent its leader, reknowned programmer Alan Kay, packing. From today's Good Morning Silicon Valley: 'HP is bidding adieu to legendary Silicon Valley technologist Alan Kay. A founder of Xerox's Palo Alto Research Center, Kay -- who once said, "The best way to predict the future is to invent it" -- was instrumental in the development of the windowing GUI and modern object-oriented programming. He envisioned a laptop computer long before the first ones rolled out and his Smalltalk programming language was a predecessor to Sun Microsystems' Java. Hard to believe HP's cutting him loose.' Maybe Apple will hire him."
Read it while you can! (Score:5, Informative)
Smalltalk (Score:5, Informative)
Kay already did work for Apple, (Score:5, Informative)
That is why the Squeak license still mentions Apple
Alan Kay Videos explaning early GUI research (Score:5, Informative)
Re:What's the big fuss? (Score:5, Informative)
Re:HP Slogans (Score:3, Informative)
Golden parachute! Golden parachute! (Score:3, Informative)
How could the board approve of her action which is obviously doing nothing more than achieving her own personal goal while damaging the company as a whole? Unless, of course, the major investors who back Carly approve of this. I cannot tell for sure, but that's very possible - the major investors believe that HP is doomed.
alan kay - winner of some minor prize in CS (Score:5, Informative)
Re:Smalltalk (Score:5, Informative)
While you say "aggressively dynmically typed" you also remember you always have the option of statically typing.
Re:And... (Score:3, Informative)
Re:Golden parachute! Golden parachute! (Score:3, Informative)
Feb 9th, 2005: http://www.theregister.co.uk/2005/02/09/carly_fio
Re:Read it while you can! (Score:1, Informative)
Alan Kay is one of the earliest pioneers of personal computing, and his research continues today.
At the Utah ARPA Project in 1966, inspired by Sketchpad, Simula, biology and algebra, he invented dynamic object-oriented programming.
In 1967-9 he and Ed Cheadle invented the FLEX Machine, a very early modern desktop machine they called a "personal computer". It had a display, a pointing and drawing tablet, a multiple window graphical user interface, and the first object oriented operating system.
During this time he also participated in the design of the ARPAnet, the forerunner of the Internet.
In 1968, after a visit to Seymour Papert's early LOGO work with children, he designed "a personal computer for children of all ages" -- the Dynabook -- in the form of a very portable notebook, with a flat-screen, stylus, wireless network, and local storage.
At Xerox PARC in the early 70s he invented Smalltalk, which was the first complete dynamic object oriented language, development, and operating system. It is still the leading such system today, especially in the free open-source version called Squeak.
At PARC he was one of the instigators for the first bitmap displays (that all computers use today), and the main inventor of the now ubiquitous overlapping windows, icons, point-click-and-drag user interface.
He was head of one of several groups at PARC that together created much of modern computing, including: the personal computer with bitmap display, overlapping windows GUI, WYSIWYG word processing & desktop publishing, object-oriented OS, music synthesis, painting and animation, laser printing, Ethernet, client-server (and peer-peer) networking, and parts of the Internet.
Most of his contributions from 1968 onwards have been the result of trying to invent and test better learning environments, mainly for children.
He has been a Xerox Fellow, Chief Scientist of Atari, Apple Fellow, Disney Fellow, and is now President of Viewpoints Research Institute.
Formal Education: BA in Mathematics and Molecular Biology with minor concentrations in English and Anthropology from the University of Colorado, 1966. MS and PhD in Computer Science (both with distinction) from the University of Utah, 1968 and 1969.
He started in show business as a professional jazz guitarist. Much of his subsequent work combined music and theatrical production. Today he is an avid amateur classical pipe organist.
Honors include: J-D Warnier Prix d'Informatique, ACM Systems Software Award, Computers & Communication Foundation Prize, Lewis Branscomb Technology Award, etc.
He has been elected a Fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, the National Academy of Engineering, and the Royal Society of Arts.
Re:HP doesn't need Kay. (Score:2, Informative)
Laserjets, I deal with them almost every day. When there is not a bank branch install or some state/county/city project; there is always a printer that needs to be fixed. I still see the old ones cranking out nice crisp pages. The main downfall to a laserjet, or any printer, is the end user. Paper jam? Maybe this letter opener will fix it! Or, is coffee bad for a printer? Before someone flames the hell out of me I'll continue with this...UPS and FedEx (or anyone in shipping) also do their fair share of making sure you get a guaranteed lemon. As far as inkjets go...I have not seen one that I like. I have noticed, however, with all printers; the more they look like a box the better they work. All of that curvy crap tends to suck. Xerox Phasers kick much butt. They are however a real pain to fix and they run really hot!
HP seemed to take a little break and brought nothing new to market. Instead of making great new products, they kept on milking the same printer lines until they got old, crusty, and expensive to operate.
HP makes really decent servers and networking equipment. Yeah, yeah, they are second to Cisco as far as networking equipment. We'll see how that plays out in ten years.
Just the tip of the iceberg (Score:1, Informative)
http://www.hpl.hp.com/research/crl/ [hp.com]
Jim Gettys the author of the X Windows System.
Keith Packard the founder of FreeDesktop.
All the founders and supporters of handhelds.org.
The open source community is going to be hit hard by this one. These are people that will be missed.
The Cambridge Research Lab was the last living ember of Digital Equipment Corps Lab. These are the folks that created alta vista, speechbot.com, jukebox (ipod), etc...
Check out the old DEC website and compare the projects:
http://www.crl.hpl.hp.com/ [hp.com]
The difference in the spirit of the web sites says it all. The HP site looks cold and dead. The DEC site is alive.
Re:And... (Score:2, Informative)
A view from a voluntary severee (Score:2, Informative)
I'm sorry, I sound bitter. I'm not though, HP was fairly sensitive and generous to those of us that chose to leave on our own accord. I'm glad I did. There's just sadly nothing about HP anymore that makes it better to work for than anywhere else, and there once was. It has become, even at the printing level, an integrator of other technologies rather than a source. Thus the dissolution of this and other research groups will continue. Hurd wants to bring R&D "closer to the customer." I also doubt that severance packages will ever be that generous again. I found a good job in a completely different industry, and I wish HP the best of luck. Wow, that was therapeutic.
By the way, if you have not read it, check out the article that pissed off VJ [businessweek.com]. I don't know how they did it, but Business Week nailed it almost 100%.
Coined and invented are two different things (Score:5, Informative)
Comment removed (Score:4, Informative)
Maybe Apple will hire him... (Score:5, Informative)
They fired Jim Gettys too (Score:3, Informative)
Re:Yet More HP Slogans (Score:5, Informative)
Squeak http://www.squeak.org/ [squeak.org]
Croquet http://opencroquet.org/ [opencroquet.org]
eToys http://squeakland.org/ [squeakland.org]
Re:But HP may be losing customer orientation (Score:4, Informative)
Father of OOP? (Score:2, Informative)
They created the first OOP language [wikipedia.org], after all...
Re:Agreed (Score:2, Informative)
Re:HP is a huge company.... (Score:3, Informative)