Daniel Henry Holmes Ingalls, Jr.

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Daniel Henry Holmes Ingalls, Jr. is a pioneer of object-oriented computer programming and the principal architect, designer and implementor of five generations of Smalltalk environments. He designed the bytecoded virtual machine that made Smalltalk practical in 1976. He also invented Bit blit, the general-purpose graphical operation that underlies most bitmap graphics systems today, and pop-up menus. 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.

Ingalls also developed Fabrik, a visual programming environment consisting of a kit of computational and user-interface components that can be "wired" together to build new components and useful applications. Although Ingalls is best known for his work on Smalltalk, he is also known for the development of an optical character recognition system for Devanagari writing, which he did at the instigation of his father, Daniel H. H. Ingalls, Sr., a professor of Sanskrit.

Ingalls received the ACM Grace Murray Hopper Award for Outstanding Young Scientist in 1984. He has also received the ACM Software Systems Award.

Ingalls 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 and never returned to academia.

Dan Ingalls currently works as a Distinguished Engineer at Sun Microsystems, where he works in the SunLabs research wing. He previously worked at Hewlett-Packard where he developed a module architecture for Squeak. He lives at the beach in Aptos, California with his wife Cathleen Galas, from which he continues to contribute to the development of the Squeak implementation of Smalltalk.

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[edit] Bibliography

Dan Ingalls Bio biography on Squeak site

Ingalls, Daniel (1975) Untitled interoffice memo of November 19, 1975, Xerox PARC.

Ingalls, Daniel H.H. and Daniel H.H. Ingalls 1985: The MahAbhArata: Stylistic study, computer analysis and concordance. Journal of South Asian Literature 20:17-46.