KEVIN LYNCH

I'm currently VP, Technology at Apple, working with an incredibly talented team.

Previously I was CTO at Adobe, where I helped define and bring to life Creative Cloud for creative professionals, and Adobe Marketing Cloud for marketing professionals. I had joined Macromedia in 1996, and led its move to Web publishing, including the creation of Dreamweaver and a whole new generation of tools and technologies to advance expressiveness on the Web. Adobe acquired Macromedia in 2005.

Photo of Kevin Lynch

Prior to Adobe/Macromedia, I was with a startup called General Magic where I had the great opportunity to work with some of my heroes who had created the Mac, as well as with some amazing like-minded young engineers. We worked intensely to pioneer handheld personal communicators supporting multimedia email, network services, and mobile agents running on the network in the mid-1990s.

Earlier, I was a Mac software developer. I helped develop the first Mac release of FrameMaker and then led their core technology team. Frame Technology was also acquired by Adobe. Prior to this, I helped establish one of the first Mac software startups in 1984.

I began programming when I was young, and studied interactive computer graphics at the University of Illinois, working with artists and engineers in the Electronic Visualization Laboratory.

FOUNDATION

Many great thinkers developed the foundations that influence what we do today. Some that inspire me from early computing include:

As We May Think by Vannevar Bush (July 1945)

Man-Computer Symbiosis & The Computer as a Communication Device by J.C.R. Licklider (1960, 1968)

Spacewar by Stephen Russell, Peter Samson, Dan Edwards and Martin Graetz, together with Alan Kotok, Steve Piner and Robert A. Saunders. (1962)

Augmenting Human Intellect: A Conceptual Framework by Douglas Engelbart, SRI (October 1962)

Sketchpad: A Man-Machine Graphical Communication System (video demo) by Ivan Sutherland, MIT (1963)

The Mythical Man-Month by Frederick Brooks, lessons learned from IBM's System/360 project (1975)

The Xerox Star: A Retrospective about the team of Alan Kay, Larry Tesler, Charles Irby, John Warnock, Chuck Geschke, Charles Simonyi, Butler Lampson, David Liddle, Ed Satterthwaite, and many others at Xerox (1975-1981)

The Soul of a New Machine by Tracy Kidder, about a team building a new computer at Data General (1981)

Inventing the Lisa User Interface developed by Larry Tesler, Bill Atkinson, and the Lisa team at Apple (1979-1983)

Postscript developed by John Warnock & Chuck Geschke (1984)

Macintosh developed by Andy Hertzfeld, Bill Atkinson, Susan Kare, Bud Tribble, Burrell Smith, Mike Boich, Joanna Hoffman, Mike Murray, George Crow, Bruce Horn, Steve Capps, Caroline Rose, Jef Raskin, Steve Jobs and many more (1984)

Information Management: A Proposal by Tim Berners-Lee, CERN (1989)

The Computer for the 21st Century by Mark Weiser, Xerox PARC (September 1991)