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Cincom Congratulates Smalltalk Inventor Alan Kay on Winning 2003 Turing Award

Posted on: Tuesday, 4 May 2004, 06:00 CDT

Cincom Systems, Inc., developer of the Smalltalk object-oriented programming language, today expressed its congratulations to computer pioneer Alan Kay in sharing in the 2003 Turing Award, the computer science prize.

The Turing Award, named for a British mathematician and World War II cryptanalyst, was announced April 19 in New York by the Association for Computing Machinery. The Turing Award brings a $100,000 prize, funded by Intel Corporation. ACM will present the Turing Award at the annual ACM Awards Banquet on June 5, 2004, at the Plaza Hotel in New York.

Kay was named this month for leading the team that invented Smalltalk, the revolutionary programming language that first used completely object-oriented concepts, and for his contributions to personal computing. Cincom offers two implementations of the object-oriented language to software developers.

The Turing was Kay's second top prize since February, when he and three former colleagues from the Xerox Palo Alto Research Center (PARC) shared engineering's highest award, the $500,000 Draper Prize from the National Academy of Engineering.

Smalltalk, the first complete dynamic object-oriented programming language, included a revolutionary visual authoring environment that is now common in computer applications. Smalltalk unified data and instructions with concepts that altered traditional language design and programming metaphors. These concepts influenced later object-oriented languages such as C++ and Java.

Kay's interest in children and education led him to use Smalltalk as an early vehicle for teaching computing concepts to kids in elementary school. Working at Xerox's Palo Alto Research Center, he adapted cognitive psychology to show that children learned better when touch, images, symbols and text were combined.

The Turing Award committee cited Kay's vision with Smalltalk as part of a "user-centered" approach to computing, which led to the development of screen windows, a basic component of the now ubiquitous graphical user interface. The committee also credited Kay's team with inspiring both the laptop computer and a generation of computer scientists and engineers, thus laying the intellectual foundation for the personal computer revolution, said the committee chairman, Professor Gary Chapman.

Kay is a senior fellow at Hewlett Packard Labs and president of Viewpoints Research Institute, which he founded in 2001. He has received numerous awards and honors, and he has held key positions with some of the computer industry's founding companies, including Apple and Atari.

The Cincom Smalltalk software development suite is an object-oriented environment providing instant binary portable cross-platform application development. It is the state-of-the-art environment for software developers who need to build applications better, faster, and cheaper. Cincom Smalltalk is the most productive programming tool that enables scalable web-based intranet and internet systems, as well as client-server development. Unlike JAVA, C++, or VisualBasic, Cincom Smalltalk offers significant productivity enhancements, allowing developers to bring their products to market significantly faster.

In Cincom's ObjectStudio and VisualWorks(R) implementations, Smalltalk is an easy-to-learn and easy-to-use tool that Smalltalk programmers use to solve problems faster, with as little as one-half the code necessary with other languages (Linea Engineering Study). Cincom Smalltalk is a stable, mature, and robust software development technology that allows businesses to meet customer demands and reduce costs.

About Cincom

Cincom, the world's most experienced software company, builds, sells, and supports software for data access and integration, process automation, manufacturing business solutions, and business communications as well as international IT and call center outsourcing.

Cincom serves thousands of clients on six continents including BMW, Citibank, Boeing, Northwestern Mutual, Federal Express, Ericsson, Prudential Financial, Christian Children's Fund, Mayo Health System, Penn State University, Messier-Dowty, Siemens, Rockwell Automation, Bertelsmann Music Group (BMG), and Trane.

 Contact: Andrew Ignatow Smalltalk Marketing Manager 513-612-2300 www.cincom.comhttp://smalltalk.cincom.com/index.ssp

SOURCE: Cincom Systems, Inc

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