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End User History - http://www.cems.uwe.ac.uk/amrc/seeds/PeterHale/EndUserHistory.htm.

Alan Kay and Croquet

In the late sixties Alan Kay [2][3][17] used the term 'personal computer' and created a concept prototype, the FLEX Machine, he also envisaged a 'Dynabook' machine, the sketches for this look very similar to the laptop computers of recent years.

Alan Kay joined the Xerox Palo Alto Research Center (PARC) [17][19] California in 1971. Throughout the seventies the group at PARC led by Dr. Kay developed an integrated programming language and programming environment called Smalltalk. In the early seventies the Alto personal computer was created at the PARC. The Alto eventually featured the world's first What-You-See-Is-What-You-Get (WYSIWYG) editor, a commercial mouse for input, a graphical user interface (GUI), and bit-mapped display, and offered menus and icons, and linked to a local area network. The Alto provided the foundation for Xerox's STAR 8010 Information System. There was still a need to find a common use for a personal computer that would increase the demand for it.

Alan Kay and Seymour Papert envisioned in the 1960's the computer's role as a tool for the mind an 'idea processor'. They have worked at bringing computers into this role for adults and children through several of Croquet, and Croquet's predecessors like the Logo language and environment by Papert, and Squeak, the open source Smalltalk language and environment, by Kay. Squeak and Croquet have developed from the early work in Smalltalk and provided a tool for end user programming, collaboration, visualisation, and simulation.

Links

Alan Kay, Allen Cypher - Watch What I Do - Programming by Example.

3. Alan Kay - ETech 2003 Presentation, ETech O'Reilly Emerging Technology Conference, Westin Santa Clara April 22-25 2003 - http://www.lisarein.com/alankay/tour.html - Lisa Rein's Tour Of Alan Kay's Etech 2003 Presentation.

Croquet - http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Croquet_project - Wikipedia - Croquet Project.

Croquet - http://www.opencroquet.org/ - a new open source software platform for creating deeply collaborative multi-user online applications.

The Early History Of Smalltalk by Alan Kay - 1967-69--The FLEX Machine, a first attempt at an OOP-based personal computer - Alan Kay - Smalltalk.org.

Kyoto Prize Laureates 2004 - 2004 Kyoto Prize Laureates - Dr. Alan Curtis Kay (U.S.A., b. 1940) - Computer Scientist, President, Viewpoints Research Institute.

Palo Alto Research Center (PARC) - History - http://www.parc.xerox.com/about/history/default.html - PARC History.

Squeak - http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Squeak - Wikipedia - Squeak.

Watch What I Do Programming by Demonstration - Cypher, A, (Forward by Alan Kay) 1993, MIT Press, ISBN:0262032139.

http://www.acypher.com/wwid/FrontMatter/index.html.

E-Learning - http://www.cems.uwe.ac.uk/~phale/ELearning.htm.

Developed by Peter Hale, 2006. The University of the West of England, Bristol, UK.