Don Hopkins is an

artist An artist is a person engaged in an activity related to creating art, practicing the arts, or demonstrating the work of art. The most common usage (in both everyday speech and academic discourse) refers to a practitioner in the visual arts o ...

and

programmer A programmer, computer programmer or coder is an author of computer source code someone with skill in computer programming. The professional titles Software development, ''software developer'' and Software engineering, ''software engineer' ...

specializing in human computer interaction and

computer graphics Computer graphics deals with generating images and art with the aid of computers. Computer graphics is a core technology in digital photography, film, video games, digital art, cell phone and computer displays, and many specialized applications. ...

. He is an alumnus of the

University of Maryland The University of Maryland, College Park (University of Maryland, UMD, or simply Maryland) is a public land-grant research university in College Park, Maryland, United States. Founded in 1856, UMD is the flagship institution of the Univ ...

and a former member of the University of Maryland Human–Computer Interaction Lab. He inspired

Richard Stallman Richard Matthew Stallman ( ; born March 16, 1953), also known by his initials, rms, is an American free software movement activist and programmer. He campaigns for software to be distributed in such a manner that its users have the freedom to ...

, who described him as a "very imaginative fellow", to use the term

copyleft Copyleft is the legal technique of granting certain freedoms over copies of copyrighted works with the requirement that the same rights be preserved in derivative works. In this sense, ''freedoms'' refers to the use of the work for any purpose, ...

. He coined Deep Crack as the name of the EFF DES cracker. He ported the '' SimCity'' computer game to several versions of

Unix Unix (, ; trademarked as UNIX) is a family of multitasking, multi-user computer operating systems that derive from the original AT&T Unix, whose development started in 1969 at the Bell Labs research center by Ken Thompson, Dennis Ritchie, a ...

and developed a multi player version of ''SimCity'' for X11, did much of the core programming of ''

The Sims ''The Sims'' is a series of life simulation video games developed by Maxis and Video game publisher, published by Electronic Arts. The franchise has sold nearly 200 million copies worldwide, and is one of the List of best-selling video game fran ...

'', 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 manager A window manager is system software that controls the placement and appearance of window (computing), windows within a windowing system in a graphical user interface. Most window managers are designed to help provide a desktop environment. They ...

Emacs Emacs (), originally named EMACS (an acronym for "Editor Macros"), is a family of text editors that are characterized by their extensibility. The manual for the most widely used variant, GNU Emacs, describes it as "the extensible, customizable, s ...

, ''SimCity'' and ''The Sims'', and published a frequently cited paper about pie menus at CHI'88 with John Raymond Callahan, Ben Shneiderman and Mark Weiser. He has published many

free software Free software, libre software, libreware sometimes known as freedom-respecting software is computer software distributed open-source license, under terms that allow users to run the software for any purpose as well as to study, change, distribut ...

and

open source Open source is source code that is made freely available for possible modification and redistribution. Products include permission to use and view the source code, design documents, or content of the product. The open source model is a decentrali ...

implementations of pie menus for X10, X11,

NeWS News is information about current events. This may be provided through many different Media (communication), media: word of mouth, printing, Mail, postal systems, broadcasting, Telecommunications, electronic communication, or through the te ...

, Tcl/tk,

ScriptX ScriptX is a discontinued multimedia-oriented development environment created in 1990 by Kaleida Labs. Unlike packages such as Macromedia Director, ScriptX is not an authoring tool for creating multimedia titles, although it does come with a bu ...

ActiveX ActiveX is a deprecated software framework created by Microsoft that adapts its earlier Component Object Model (COM) and Object Linking and Embedding (OLE) technologies for content downloaded from a network, particularly from the World Wide W ...

JavaScript JavaScript (), often abbreviated as JS, is a programming language and core technology of the World Wide Web, alongside HTML and CSS. Ninety-nine percent of websites use JavaScript on the client side for webpage behavior. Web browsers have ...

, 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 The X Window System (X11, or simply X) is a windowing system for bitmap displays, common on Unix-like operating systems. X originated as part of Project Athena at Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) in 1984. The X protocol has been at ...

in the book The UNIX-HATERS Handbook.

Micropolis

Hopkins, supported by John Gilmore, adapted ''SimCity'' for the OLPC XO-1 laptop. The current version includes pie menus and is explained in depth in a video released by Hopkins. Since its primary objective is education, the OLPC project is looking not just for games, but for tools that enable kids to program their own games. Hopkins programmed Micropolis to make it easy to extend in many interesting ways. He added functionality to let kids create new disasters and agents (like the monster, tornado, helicopter and train), and program them like in many of the other games on the XO. The goals of deeply integrating ''SimCity'' with OLPC's

Sugar Sugar is the generic name for sweet-tasting, soluble carbohydrates, many of which are used in food. Simple sugars, also called monosaccharides, include glucose Glucose is a sugar with the Chemical formula#Molecular formula, molecul ...

user interface are to focus on education and accessibility for younger kids, as well as motivating and enabling older kids to learn programming.SimCity for OLPC: Applying Papert's Ideas About Constructionist Education and Teaching Kids to Program
/ref>

''The Sims''

''The Sims'' is a simulation video game developed by

Electronic Arts Electronic Arts Inc. (EA) is an American video game company headquartered in Redwood City, California. Founded in May 1982 by former Apple Inc., Apple employee Trip Hawkins, the company was a pioneer of the early home computer game industry ...

. The games are known for their very loose guidelines and no specific user goals. They allow the users to simply exist in the virtual world they create. Don Hopkins became involved in ''The Sims'' after he worked at

Sun Microsystems Sun Microsystems, Inc., often known as Sun for short, was an American technology company that existed from 1982 to 2010 which developed and sold computers, computer components, software, and information technology services. Sun contributed sig ...

. ''The Sims'' were a theme in his work since then and he has contributed to much of the design and conceptual development of the game. He was hired to port ''The Sims'' to Unix. He implemented the usage of pie menus to the game so that users could efficiently carry out actions in the game world.

References

External links

* {{DEFAULTSORT:Hopkins, Don Living people Cellular automatists American computer scientists University of Maryland, College Park alumni Year of birth missing (living people)