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Dan Ingalls

Dan Ingalls has been the principal architect of five generations of Smalltalk environments. He designed the byte-coded virtual machine that made Smalltalk practical in 1976. He also invented BitBlt, the general-purpose graphical operation that underlies most bitmap graphics systems today, as well as pop-up menus. He has received the ACM Grace Hopper Award for Outstanding Young Scientist, and the ACM Software Systems Award.

Dan's major contributions to the Squeak system include the original concept of a Smalltalk written in itself and made portable and efficient by a Smalltalk-to-C translator. He also designed the generalizations of BitBlt to arbitrary color depth, with built-in scaling, rotation, and anti-aliasing. He worked with John Maloney to produce much of Squeak's Morphic and MVC frameworks, as well as its audio support.

Dan is currently at Sun Microsystems where he is working on a new kernel for JavaScript that will offer the reflective capabilities needed for proper development support, as well as in-browser support for other high-level languages.

Dan Received his B.A. in Physics from Harvard University, and his M.S. in Electrical Engineering from Stanford University. While working toward a PhD at Stanford, he started a company to sell a software measurement invention that he perfected. As the challenges and rewards of industry have continued to hold his interest, he never returned to academia.

Dan lives with his wife Cathie in Rio del Mar, California, and enjoys hiking and biking in the summer and snowboarding in the winter.