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."

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More Info

[Joceyln Parfitt]

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

Re:Good to see originators getting credit.

[Amiga Lover]

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.

Dealers of Lightning

[tsangc]

There's a really excellent book about PARC and the development of the Alto called Dealers of Lightning:

http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/tg/detail/-/08 87 308910/103-7794804-1212634?v=glance

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.

Re:Dealers of Lightning

[TheAncientHacker]

Great book. I've been lucky enough to know some of the people involved and this books is really accurate. (Well, by technology history book standards)

Ethernet

[dtio]

For those from outer space the text 'the vision, conception, and development of the principles for, and their effective integration in, the world's first practical networked personal computers' refers to the development of the ethernet network technology, no more no less.

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.

Re:Alan Kay and the rest of the PARC crew richly

[TheAncientHacker]

Or, to put it simply for the historically challenged with some milestones added in for perspective:

• 1972 - Xerox GUI/Smalltalk/Ethernet/Laser Printer
• 1973
• 1974
• 1975 - Altair 8800 (not GUI)
• 1976
• 1977 - Apple ][ (not GUI)
• 1978
• 1979
• 1980
• 1981 - IBM PC - MS-DOS (not GUI)
• 1982
• 1983 - Apple Lisa
• 1984 - Apple Macintosh
• 1985 - Microsoft Windows
• 1986
• 1987 - IBM/Microsoft OS/2 (not GUI)
• 1988 - IBM/Microsoft OS/2 Presentation Manager

See www.squeak.org

[TheAncientHacker]

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."

Misleading attribution in original post

[alispguru]

The prize is shared amongst two ex-Xerox people, with MIT and HP also making a showing.

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?

Re:Good to see originators getting credit.

[UnknowingFool]

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.