2003 Turing award announced.

ACM (Association for Computing Machinery), founded in 1947 is the world's first educational and scientific computing society. With over 75,000 members, it is a major force in advancing the skills of information technology professionals and students wordwide.

ACM's most prestigious technical award is the Turing award. It carries a prize of $100,000 and is considered to be an honour among the computing community. The list of the earlier recepients of this award reads like a virtual who's who of computing, viz. Richard Hamming, EW Dijkstra, Donald Knuth, Ken Thompson, Dennis Ritchie, Niklaus Wirth, etc.

This year's Turing award has been given to Alan Kay. For those who do not know Alan Kay, he is the person who created Smalltalk, a language that is considered to be 'purely' object oriented and that is used as a standard for comparison with other languages that claim to be object-oriented. Alan Kay was also responsible for pioneering many of the ideas at the root of contemporary object-oriented programming languages and as such is one of the founding fathers of the concept of OOP. In addition to this, he is also the conceiver of the laptop computer and considered by many as the architect of the modern windowing GUI. As if that wasn't enough already, he also participated in the early design of ARPANet which, as we all know, became the Internet. Among his other achievements have been the involvement in the teams that developed Ethernet, laser printing and network "client-servers".

Alan Kay is also famous for his celebrated quote, "The best way to predict the future is to invent it."

And he has been true to his words if you consider his life's works.