Alan Kay

The Dynabook idea and overlapping windows. In 1972 Kay described the Dynabook, a book-sized computer for children, years before such hardware was possible. At Xerox PARC his Learning Research Group built Smalltalk, an object-oriented language whose graphical environment on the Alto introduced overlapping windows and pop-up menus. Much of what Apple and later Microsoft shipped drew on that work. He received the Turing Award in 2003.