"By the time I got to school, I had already read a couple hundred books. I knew in the first grade that they were lying to me because I had already been exposed to other points of view. School is basically about one point of view -- the one the teacher has or the textbooks have. They don't like the idea of having different points of view, so it was a battle. Of course I would pipe up with my five-year-old voice."
Alan also developed an appreciation of music at an early age, and learned to play the guitar and sing as a youngster. These skills would later enable him to earn a living during a later period when he was figuring out what to do with his life.
He enrolled in Bethany College in West Virginia in the early 1960's, but was expelled for protesting treatment of Jews. After enlisting in the U.S. Air Force, he did well on a computer programming aptitude test and was assigned to work on a IBM 1401 computer. After discharge from the Air Force, he enrolled at the University of Colorado and earned a degree in Mathematics and Molecular Biology. He then attended graduate school at the University of Utah, where he worked with Ivan Sutherland using Sutherland's "SketchPad" program.
In 1968, Alan met Seymour Papert at the MIT Artificial Intelligence Laboratory, and observed Seymour and his associates teaching children how to program using the Logo language, invented by Seymour. After earning a PhD from Utah, Alan spent two years at the Stanford Artifical Intelligence Lab, and began thinking about the notebook sized computer. His original ideas on the subject were for a computer used by children in elementary education. He also began designing the Smalltalk language.
In 1972, Alan joined the Xerox Palo Alto Research Center (Xerox PARC) and continued the developent of Smalltalk, particularly as it applied to teaching small children to program computers. During this time, he also formalized the design of a general purpose laptop computer he dubbed the "DynaBook", even though the technology to build such a device did not yet exist. He also contributed to the development of Ethernet, laser printing, and client-server software architecture.
After leaving Xerox PARC in 1983 and a brief stay with Atari, Alan joined Apple computer and was instrumental in the development of the MacIntosh computer. In 1996 he left Apple to join Disney as a "Disney Fellow", to continue the advancement of the computer into the future.
The computer revolution hasn't happened yet
Alan's speech on Education to the U.S. House of Representatives
Last Modified 10/20/97 -- riley@cc.gatech.edu