Alan Kay moves again

Alan Kay, essentially the father of modern desktop computing, has joined Hewlett-Packard. Kay worked at Xerox PARC (Palo Alto Research Center) where the graphical user interface, laser printer, and Smalltalk object oriented programming language were developed in the 1970s. He was later a research fellow at Atari, then spent a dozen years at Apple, the company that had hired researchers from PARC and come closest to implementing his ideas. Apple's finances hit the skids and he moved on to Walt Disney Imagineering in 1996. Today, Kay is perhaps best known for imagining the Dynabook (Dynamic Book) as a personal digital assistant. Apple borrowed his thinking again for its Knowledge Navigator mock-up, and the same ideas surfaced most recently in Microsoft's Tablet PC initiative.