Alan Cooper
Alan Cooper (born June 3, 1952) is an American software designer and programmer. Widely recognized as the "Father of Visual Basic", Cooper is also known for his books About Face: The Essentials of Interaction Design and The Inmates Are Running the Asylum: Why High-Tech Products Drive Us Crazy and How to Restore the Sanity. As founder of Cooper, a leading interaction design consultancy, he created the Goal-Directed design methodology and pioneered the use of personas as practical interaction design tools to create high-tech products. On April 28, 2017, Alan was inducted into the Computer History Museum's Hall of Fellows "for his invention of the visual development environment in Visual BASIC, and for his pioneering work in establishing the field of interaction design and its fundamental tools." Biography Early life Alan Cooper grew up in Marin County, California, United States where he attended the College of Marin, studying architecture. He learned programming and took on contract programming jobs to pay for college. In 1975, soon after he left college and as the first microcomputers became available, Alan Cooper founded his first company, Structured Systems Group (SSG), in Oakland, California, which became one of the first microcomputer software companies. SSG's software accounting product, General Ledger, was sold through ads in popular magazines such as Byte and Interface Age. This software was, according to the historical account in Fire in the Valley (by Paul Freiberger and Michael Swaine), “probably the first serious business software for microcomputers.” It was both the start of Cooper's career as a software author and the beginning of the microcomputer software business. Ultimately, Cooper developed a dozen original products at Structured Systems Group before he sold his interest in the company in 1980. Early on, Cooper worked with Gordon Eubanks to develop, debug, document, and publish his business programming language, CBASIC, an early competitor to Bill Gates' and Paul Allen's Microsoft BASIC. Eubanks wrote CBASIC’s precursor, BASIC-E as a student project while at the Naval Postgraduate School in Monterey, California with professor Gary Kildall. When Eubanks left the Navy, he joined Kildall’s successful operating system company, Digital Research, Inc., in Monterey. Soon thereafter, Eubanks and Kildall invited Cooper to join them at Digital Research as one of four founders of their research and development department. After two-years at DRI, Cooper departed to develop desktop application software by himself. During the 1980s, Alan Cooper authored several business applications including Microphone II for Windows and an early, critical-path project management program called SuperProject. Cooper sold SuperProject to Computer Associates in 1984, where it achieved success in the business-to-business marketplace. Visual Basic In 1988, Alan Cooper created a visual programming language (code-named “Ruby”) that allowed Windows users to build “Finder”-like shells. He called it “a shell construction set." After he demonstrated Ruby to Bill Gates, Microsoft purchased it. At the time, Gates commented that the innovation would have a “profound effect” on their entire product line. Microsoft initially decided not to release the product as a shell for users, but rather to