Charles Thacker, Turing Award Winner, Recognized For Work On First Modern PC

SAN JOSE, Calif. — A Microsoft Corp. researcher won the $250,000 Turing Award, one of technology's most coveted prizes, on Tuesday for his work helping design and build what is widely considered the first modern personal computer.

While at Xerox Corp.'s famed Palo Alto Research Center, or PARC, in the 1970s, Charles Thacker led the hardware development for the Alto, which featured innovative display and other technologies that helped inspire future generations of computers.

Thacker, 67, was also co-inventor of the Ethernet networking technology for connecting computers, which is still widely used.

Thacker said he would probably donate the money to his alma mater, the University of California, Berkeley.

"I was flabbergasted," he said in an interview Tuesday. "I frankly never expected to get the award, because it wasn't given to people like me. Most of the people who have gotten the Turing award in the past few years are software people or theoreticians. There are scant few people who have actually built some hardware."

Other recent winners include Internet pioneers Vint Cerf and Robert Kahn, and Doug Engelbart, the inventor of the computer mouse.

The Turing Award is funded by Google Inc. and Intel Corp. It is named for the mathematician Alan Turing and is administered by Association for Computing Machinery.

The association's president, Wendy Hall, said that Thacker is "one of the most distinguished computer systems engineers in the history of the field" and that his innovations have "profoundly affected the course of modern computing."

Comments

[trudyjh]

04:26 PM on 03/10/2010

The other people who developed that and whose names are on the patent are, I suspect, rather bent out of shape.

[RedDogBear]

09:25 PM on 03/10/2010

I suspect not. In my experience people who work in science and engineerin­g tend to be pretty collaborat­ive and more interested in sharing credit rather than stabbing people in the back.

[SamanthaBee]

05:03 AM on 03/10/2010

Amazing, I fully expected all the HP Apple Fanboi's foaming at the mouth over this especially since he is a Fellow at MS. To them Kim Jong Jobs and the Holy Corporatio­n of Apple orginated every technology idea.

[iamvalid]

09:45 AM on 03/10/2010

True, but even the idea that Jobs and CO. invented anything but hype is prepostero­us. Apple has purloined their way to success, often on the backs of hard working open source programmer­s. It should be a cold day in hades indeed, before anyone should let Steve Jobs into one of their facilities for a tour. Of course Apple now has the audacity to sue HTC for their "Ahem, cough, cough, cough", inventions­.

[RedDogBear]

09:27 PM on 03/10/2010

Please grow up

[RedDogBear]

09:22 PM on 03/09/2010

I worked on one of those early Xerox machines. Not sure if it was the Alto or a successor but damn it was a nice machine. Even in the late 80's when I worked on it, it blew away any other available machines for doing desktop graphics and just for overall usability. Macs were great but those machines were works of art.

[RedDogBear]

09:19 PM on 03/09/2010

A few facts about Turing, the person that the award is named after: He was one of the people most responsibl­e for the allied victory over the Axis. He created a machine which was a precursor to the modern digital computer and used that machine to break the N@zi codes for their Enigma machines. He also defined the mathematic­al abstract model (called a Turing machine although its a formalism not an actual machine) used to this day to model all possible digital computers.

Turing was also gay and while the UK looked the other way during the war after the war they still had laws about that sort of thing and the local officials hounded him and were set to send him to jail for quite a long time essentiall­y for being gay. He committed suicide by eating a poison apple. Rumor has it that the apple logo (an apple with a bite out of it) is an homage to him.

[jackstpaul]

05:59 AM on 03/11/2010

And his artificial intelligen­ce work; the Turing Test--extr­aordinaril­y influentia­l as a theorist.

[RedDogBear]

10:28 PM on 03/11/2010

Yes. One of the fathers of AI.