Dan Ingalls (Daniel Henry Holmes Ingalls, Jr.) is a U.S. computer scientist. He is a Distinguished Engineer at Sun Microsystems, where he works in the SunLabs research wing. He was one of the principal designers and implementors of Smalltalk. He also invented Bit blit, the general-purpose graphical operation that underlies most bitmap graphics systems today, and pop-up menus.

Although Ingalls is best known for his work on Smalltalk, he is also known for the development of an optical character recognition system for Devanagari writing, which he did at the instigation of his father, Daniel H. H. Ingalls, Sr., a professor of Sanskrit.

Ingalls received the ACM Grace Murray Hopper Award for Outstanding Young Scientist in 1984. He has also received the ACM Software Systems Award.

Ingalls received his B.A. in Physics from Harvard University, and his M.S. in Electrical Engineering from Stanford University. While working toward a PhD at Stanford, he started a company to sell a software measurement invention that he perfected and never returned to academia.

He currently lives in Truckee, California, from which he continues to contribute to the development of the Squeak implementation of Smalltalk.

Bibliography

• Biography on Squeak site

• Ingalls, Daniel (1975) Untitled interoffice memo of November 19, 1975, Xerox PARC.

• Ingalls, Daniel H.H. and Daniel H.H. Ingalls 1985: The MahAbhArata: Stylistic study, computer analysis and concordance. Journal of South Asian Literature 20:17-46.

• Wujastyk, D. (1988) Report on the Sanskrit Text Archive Conference Austin, Texas, October 28–29, 1988.

Computer scientists | Computer programmers