Dan Ingalls, The principal architect of five generations of Smalltalk environment

Dan Ingalls is the principal architect of five generations of Smalltalk environments. He designed the byte-coded virtual machine that made Smalltalk practical in 1976. He later conceived a Smalltalk written in itself and made portable and efficient by a Smalltalk-to-C translator, now known as the Squeak open-source Smalltalk. Dan also invented BitBlt, the general-purpose graphical operation that underlies most bitmap graphics systems today, as well as pop-up menus. His most recent work, the Lively Kernel, is a dynamic graphics and programming environment that runs entirely in a browser. Able to save its results and even new versions of itself as web pages, if offers the promise that wherever there is the web there is authoring. Dan received his B.A. in Physics from Harvard University, and his M.S. in Electrical Engineering from Stanford University. He is a recipient of the ACM Grace Hopper Award, and the ACM Software Systems Award.

Dan has recently joined SAP and is a key member of the Chief Scientist team guiding the company’s technology vision, direction and execution.