Alice K. Hartley personal archives

Alice Katherine Hartley (December 13, 1937 – June 29, 2017) was born and raised in Bridgeport, Connecticut. She consistently earned high grades throughout her elementary and secondary schooling, and was often recognized in the local newspaper for her academic accomplishments. She participated in extracurricular activities such as swimming, cheerleading, and French Club. 1955 was an especially notable year for Hartley, as she was one of the 40 finalists out of 16,033 applicants (and one of only 8 girls) in the Fourteenth Annual Westinghouse Science Talent Search, received a scholarship from General Motors and a Homemaker of Tomorrow Award from Betty Crocker, was admitted to MIT, and graduated as valedictorian of her class.

After graduating from MIT with a BS Physics in 1959, Hartley started working full-time for Melpar, an American government contractor during the 20th century Cold War period, where she stayed until 1961. There, she worked on stock market averages for S&P, helicopter simulation, and numerical utilities. From 1961 to 1963, she worked for Litton Industries, where she co-authored “A Study Program of Pattern Recognition Research” and implemented a matrix manipulation package used for pattern recognition research and development. For a short period from 1966 to 1967, she worked for Medinet, where she implemented programming tools for a hospital time sharing system. In 1967, Hartley started working for Bolt, Beranek and Newman (BBN) as a Senior Scientist. At BBN, she worked on a range of things, such as designing and implementing the core of Interlisp, a programming environment built around a version of Lisp, and a window system for Lisp; writing proposals and reports for Interlisp research and development contracts; and developing a language for speech experts to use in speech recognition research.

Hartley resigned from BBN on November 7th, 1984, to start working for Palladian Software Inc., a new AI engineering firm, where she was the Director of AI Technology from 1984-1985 and Vice President of Technology from 1985-1988. During that time, she helped design and implement the Management Advisor (MA), which helped managers without financial expertise to analyze the financial impact of management decisions, and the Operations Advisor (OA), which was a manufacturing planning tool. Both products were initially delivered on Symbolics Lisp machines. After taking a year-long vacation from working with computers, she joined Apple Computer Inc. in 1989 as a Principal Scientist and became an engineering manager for Macintosh Common Lisp (MCL). Although she only worked for Apple until July of 1993, Hartley continued to oversee MCL, almost single handedly, until she announced that the code would be open sourced in 2007. Alice was also known to be an avid hobby gamer, and she advised on early computer games in the 1970s and 1990s. One of these was an interactive soap opera game called Lyfe Bytes. She was also an antiques collector, importer, and dealer, and she co-owned an antiques store called Elephant & Castle in Boston with Anthony Bell, whom she was married to from 1970 to 1980.