Don Hopkins

Don Hopkins is an artist and programmer specializing in human computer interaction and computer graphics and an alumnus of the University of Maryland and a former member of the University of Maryland Human – Computer Interaction Lab.

He inspired Richard Stallman, who described him as a "very imaginative fellow", to use the term copyleft. He coined Deep Crack as the name of the EFF DES cracker, and built "AJAXian" applications for the NeWS window system 17 years before the term was coined. He ported the SimCity computer game to several versions of Unix and developed a multi player version of SimCity for X11, did much of the core programming of The Sims, and developed robot control and personality simulation software for Will Wright's Stupid Fun Club.

He developed and refined pie menus for many platforms and applications including window managers, Emacs, SimCity and The Sims, and published a frequently cited paper about pie menus at CHI'88 with Jack Callahan, Ben Shneiderman and Mark Weiser. He has published many free software and open source implementations of pie menus for X10, X11, NeWS, Tcl/tk, ScriptX, ActiveX, JavaScript, OpenLaszlo, Python and OLPC, and also proprietary implementations for The Sims and the Palm Pilot.

Hopkins also wrote demonstrations and programming examples of the ScriptX multimedia scripting language created by the Apple/IBM research spinoff Kaleida Labs, developed various OpenLaszlo applications and components, and is a hacker artist known for his artistic cellular automata. He is also known for having written a chapter “The X-Windows Disaster” on X Window System in the book The UNIX-HATERS Handbook.

Read more about Don Hopkins:  Micropolis

Famous quotes containing the words don and/or hopkins:

    “If music in general is an imitation of history, opera in particular is an imitation of human willfulness; it is rooted in the fact that we not only have feelings but insist upon having them at whatever cost to ourselves.... The quality common to all the great operatic roles, e.g., Don Giovanni, Norma, Lucia, Tristan, Isolde, Brünnhilde, is that each of them is a passionate and willful state of being. In real life they would all be bores, even Don Giovanni.”
    —W.H. (Wystan Hugh)

    “You do not mean by mystery what a Catholic does. You mean an interesting uncertainty: the uncertainty ceasing interest ceases also.... But a Catholic by mystery means an incomprehensible certainty: without certainty, without formulation there is no interest;... the clearer the formulation the greater the interest.”
    —Gerard Manley Hopkins (1844–1889)