Don Hopkins

For the baseball player, see Don Hopkins (baseball).

Don Hopkins is an artist and programmer specializing in human computer interaction and computer graphics. He is an alumnus of the University of Maryland[1] 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.[2] He coined Deep Crack as the name of the EFF DES cracker.[1] 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 John Raymond Callahan, Ben Shneiderman and Mark Weiser.[3] 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.[4] He is also known for having written a chapter "The X-Windows Disaster" on X Window System in the book The UNIX-HATERS Handbook.

  1. ^ a b "Resume for Donald Edward Hopkins". www.donhopkins.com. Retrieved Dec 10, 2022.
  2. ^ The GNU Project by Richard Stallman
  3. ^ Callahan, J.; Hopkins, D.; Weiser, M.; Shneiderman, B. (May 1, 1988). "An empirical comparison of pie vs. linear menus". Association for Computing Machinery. pp. 95–100. doi:10.1145/57167.57182. Retrieved Dec 10, 2022 – via ACM Digital Library.
  4. ^ "Fun with Cellular Automata". www.art.net. Retrieved Dec 10, 2022.