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NAE's Draper Prize Goes To PARC's Alto Developers
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."
A more detailed timeline for the awards is available here
Alltogether there are five of them, the Charles Stark Draper Prize, the Fritz J. and Dolores H. Russ Prize, the Bernard M. Gordon Prize for Innovation in Engineering and Technology Education, the Founders Award, and the Arthur M. Bueche Award
eden.h4xx.com - whacky free for all image board
Don't forget the hi-toro group which created the original Amiga, a project that was underway with a MULTITASKING gui far before any mac, and which has influenced gui design ever since. Two button mouse anyone? i don't see apple catching up there.
There's a really excellent book about PARC and the development of the Alto called Dealers of Lightning:
8 87 308910/103-7794804-1212634?v=glance
http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/tg/detail/-/0
I borrowed this book from my university library and really enjoyed reading about the development of Smalltalk, laser printers, an optical network link from two PARC buildings, Ethernet, and of course, the Alto.
Highly recommended.
Other developments from PARC are the Graphical user interface (GUI), the mouse, the WYSIWYG text editor, the laser printer, the desktop computer and the Smalltalk programming language.
Also, and more directly relevant, this is a prize for networking. Microsoft didn't have a viable networking solution for a LONG time after this, and after tons of other companies and organizations had already had large impacts.
I don't try to be right, I just try to make people think
Except, of course, for the people that influenced the PARC researchers - such as JCR Licklider at the DARPA ("Man-Machine Symbiosis" was published in 1960), Douglas Englebart's Augmentation Research Center, and others.
Great leap forwards make good copy, but rarely happen -- particularly in the history of technology.
Alan Kay who invented Smalltalk-72 and a good deal of what we now call Object Oriented is currently doing a version of Smalltalk called Squeak. Or, as the website puts it, "Squeak is an open, highly-portable Smalltalk-80 implementation whose virtual machine is written entirely in Smalltalk, making it easy to debug, analyze, and change."
Please note that all the honorees (Kay, Lampson, Taylor, Thacker) did the work in question at PARC - not at MIT, not at HP, not at Microsoft (where two of them currently work).
The "MIT and HP also making a showing" just shows the wisdom of those institutions for giving these guys a job after they've changed the world. It also shows typical Slashdot thinking - why mention HP and MIT, and leave Microsoft out, other than because Microsoft is Satan, even when they also hire the best and brightest after they've distinguished themselves elsewhere?
To a Lisp hacker, XML is S-expressions in drag.
Well, that's a pretty clueless reply...
The Alto was not the first Xerox GUI. What do you think the 72 in Smalltalk-72 was for?
As for the GUI, NO it doesn't require a "Desktop Metaphor" although Xerox DID have that in 1972. It doesn't require Overlapping Windows. It requires graphical representation of objects.
Sorry to burst your rant but this is clueless and self-important and totally wrong. It's amazing how people try to rewrite history to match what they wish would have happened.
Actually, I heard IBM invented this, and their competitors (The Seven Sisters?) invented the term to describe it (FUD).
To put a witty saying into 120 characters, jst rmv ll th vwls.
I don't ever think Apple has ever claimed credit to inventing GUI, they claim credit to making the first commercial personal computer that had a GUI. Also, Apple didn't just steal PARC's GUI, but they based their GUI on PARC's ideas. The actual details of how it worked was done by Apple. It's the same thing with other inventions in history. Henry Ford didn't invent the automobile, but he built his based on other designs. His claim to fame was to make them affordable enough for the masses to own one. Unfortunately the masses think he did because his was the first one they might have ever seen.
Well, there's spam egg sausage and spam, that's not got much spam in it.
For Alan Kay's current work, look at www.squeak.org and www.opencroquet.org.
Xerox didn't invent the mouse. It was invented by "Douglas Engelbart and his colleagues at Stanford Research Institute in the 1960s."
You are confusing your tla's. http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A647 12-2004Feb23.html
Cheers,
Ian
Alan Kay did everything, and it's good he's recognised. He saw 'organisms'; he invented the term 'object orientation'; he worked with kids and LOGO, and saw this as becoming important for grownups as well. What did Alan Kay not invent or not help invent? Smalltalk everyone's heard of.
And if they need any help financing his prize, maybe they can start a class action against Bjarne Stroustrup.
I invented the term 'object-oriented' and I can tell you I did not have C++ in mind.
-- Alan Kay
You might be thinking of the Lilith by N. Wirth. Modula-2 was created for this graphical machine, which was inspired by actually using the Xerox Alto for a year (so it is a later development).
you had me at #!