Don Hopkins

Who is Don Hopkins?

Don Hopkins is an artist and programmer specializing in human computer interaction and computer graphics and an alumnus of the University of Maryland 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. He coined Deep Crack as the name of the EFF DES cracker, and built "AJAXian" applications for the NeWS window system 17 years before the term was coined. 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 Jack Callahan, Ben Shneiderman and Mark Weiser. 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.