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NAE's Draper Prize Goes To PARC's Alto Developers

Posted by timothy on from the can-only-ascribe-to-blatant-favoritism dept.

mccalli writes "The National Academy of Engineering has awarded the Charles Stark Draper Prize to various individuals 'for the vision, conception, and development of the principles for, and their effective integration in, the world's first practical networked personal computers.' The prize is shared amongst two ex-Xerox people, with MIT and HP also making a showing."

2 of 145 comments (clear)

  1. Re:No mention of Microsoft? by Erratio · · Score: 0, Flamebait

    Umm...maybe because MS hasn't done anything innovative...probably ever. MS's R&D consists of taking other ideas which have already been researched and look promising, and then develop their own version of it. Name one MS product which wasn't just a clone of a pre-established technology. Microsoft is a business, not a technology or research company.

    --
    I don't try to be right, I just try to make people think
  2. Re:Alan Kay and the rest of the PARC crew richly by BitGeek · · Score: 0, Flamebait


    The Alto was released in 1981, not 1972.

    And the Alto was released iwth the rudiments of a GUI, not a GUI.

    Do you even know what a GUI is? A GUI is an overlapping windows system with a desktop metaphor.

    Xerox invented the mouse, ethernet, smalltalk, etc. Not the GUI.

    It is simply dishonest to claim that a research effort is the same as a final product--- you deny credit to the people who took basic research and made it usable.

    --
    Yeah, and you guys panned the ipod too: http://apple.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=01/10/23/ 1816257