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ACM Awards 2009 Turing Prize To Alto Creator Charles Thacker
scumm writes "This year's Turing Prize has been awarded to Charles Thacker, whom they describe as (among other things) the 'creator of the first modern personal computer.' From the ACM's announcement: 'ACM, the Association for Computing Machinery today named Charles P. Thacker the winner of the 2009 ACM A.M. Turing Award for his pioneering design and realization of the Alto, the first modern personal computer, and the prototype for networked personal computers. Thacker's design, which he built while at Xerox PARC (Palo Alto Research Center), reflected a new vision of a self-sufficient, networked computer on every desk, equipped with innovations that are standard in today's models. Thacker was also cited for his contributions to the Ethernet local area network, which enables multiple computers to communicate and share resources, as well as the first multiprocessor workstation, and the prototype for today's most used tablet PC, with its capabilities for direct user interaction.' For further reading, the Wall Street Journal has an article providing more background about Mr. Thacker and the Turing Prize. In the spirit of full disclosure, the submitter feels compelled to point out that this Mr. Thacker is his uncle, and that he thinks this is really cool."
Ethernet, which enables multiple computers to share porn and play networked Hearts /Fixed
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What I find more fascinating, it that despite all these ground-breaking developments, Xerox never was able to capitalize on them.
We could be all working on xPads and squawking in xPhones now.
I'm still scratching my head on this failure. Management error? Naw, can't be that.
Schroedinger's Brexit: The UK is both in and out of the EU at the same time!
I'm tickled pink.
His contributions are inspiring; in fact playing with an Alto so many years ago was the first time I got to mess with a graphics display and mouse, if only on an occasional basis for a few hours.
And I had a chance to work with Chuck a bit: he's great people, and has continued to do first class stuff ever since.
What I find more fascinating, it that despite all these ground-breaking developments, Xerox never was able to capitalize on them.
We could be all working on xPads and squawking in xPhones now.
I'm still scratching my head on this failure. Management error? Naw, can't be that.
For one thing, Xerox was in the paper-photocopy business. I've heard that its management didn't really understand the business model (hell, nobody did, except for Bill Gates) an those that did feared that a "paperless office" would result from the replacement of typewriters and file cabinets. (Yeah, right.)
Also, as innovative as Xerox's projects were, they were research projects first and marketable products second. They lacked the refinement and consumer focus (eg. user testing, industrial design) that Apple's and eventually Microsoft's products had.
Management absolutely. "We're a copier company. Why are you working on this crazy crap?"
At least Apple copied the stuff with permission, which the Anti-Apple crowd conveniently never mentions. Xerox management didn't care and basically let them have it cheap.
#naabhaprzrag, #sverubfr-000, #agi-fcbafberq, negvpyr[pynff*=' negvpyr-ary-'] { qvfcynl: abar !vzcbegnag; }
In a way, they probably capitalized more by not developing them. Established companies tend to grow by hiring people with useful skills, and then only utilizing them for about 5% of their productive day. The rest of the time, they sit around over-paid and under-employed, thinking of ways to improve the business.
But actually implementing any of those changes would be prohibitively expensive in a company that has 20x more employees than it needs. And, for a long period, longer than the patent protection perhaps, the marginal benefit of the new technology is so much less than the profit generated by the established tech that it isn't even worth trying to productize. So, yeah, you could say poor management but it's really more of a strategic decision to capitalize on a core technology and stifle alternatives rather than driving innovations into the market.
Examples abound in every industry, autos, energy. Take Google, for instance: tons of money made on basically just little text ads. And that's used to fund all sorts of interesting research that will never make them a dime. The number of employees grows. The stock goes up. The core business never changes. Dividends are never paid. Investors never benefit from 90% of the profits which are spent on employees sitting around innovating technologies that are never used.
"I assumed blithely that there were no elves out there in the darkness"
When I saw the summary, I wondered why it didn't link a wikipedia article. After looking him up there, I see why -- the article on him is incredibly thin. Here's the whole of it:
BTW, he's not to be confused with this Charles Thacker, who has nothing at all to do with computing and who you most likely would not want to meet.
Free Martian Whores!
I can't ever hear Alan Turing's name anymore without getting angry all over again at the disgraceful way he died.
He essentially founded modern Computer Science. He also lead the team that cracked the German codes during WW2. You could make a case that we owe the man for everything we have today. This is the kind of guy who should have statues in DC and Trafalgar Square. So how did we thank him? By driving the poor guy to his death, that's how.
You see, none of that other cool stuff he did mattered in the slightest because he was gay.
F'n ingrates.
It is really cool. Congratulations!
In the movie "The pirates of Silicon Valley" there is a scene where a high executive at Xerox laughts when researchers show him a prototype of new peripheral: a mouse. BIG moron.
Read this bookL
Fumbling the Future: How Xerox Invented, then Ignored, the First Personal Computer
Which is why his Stev(il)eness came out with the steal quote
They just failed at the patent game and by the time they realized they had anything IBM has patented it.
In the spirit of full disclosure, the submitter feels compelled to point out that this Mr. Thacker is his uncle, and that he thinks this is really cool.
Oh yeah? Well my uncle can beat up your uncle!
A little misunderstanding? Galileo and the Pope had a little misunderstanding...
and half of the post are homophobic jokes.
this topic doesn't seem to be stoking much passion.
TFS (though not TFA) glances over the fact that's he's working at Microsoft Research today (and has been for 13 years now) - which is where his work on tablets happened.
Somewhat ironic, actually, considering how much of its success Microsoft owes to Alto.
They did capitalize on them to some extent. I actually used some of their Xerox Star machines back in the 1980s. They were a strange combination of the most advanced computer I'd ever seen (as in: "Someday, they'll all be like this") coupled with performance limitations (slinging that kind of data around took a lot compared to the hardware of the day). They had big, high-resolution greyscale displays that put normal personal computers of the day to shame (640x200 the IBM PC? It is to laugh). They had an excellent GUI and transparent and convenient networking (things like an in/out box for files between connected machines on the network). They were just amazing systems, and easy and intuitive enough that an ordinary office secretary had little trouble understanding them and adapting their workflow.
Alas, they were hellishly expensive and, as I mentioned, a little slow sometimes. Basically, they were too far ahead of the technology curve. The software so far ahead of the available hardware that what they could deploy was both expensive and slow, and that killed off any broad market potential these systems could have had.
Management had a hand in the failure, I'm sure, but there were underlying technical limitations too.
At least Apple copied the stuff with permission
After all, how ironic if Xerox was to say "Hey, they're copying!"
The book "Dealers of Lightning" gives a good look inside PARC and Xerox at the time.
Cheap? The stock that Xerox got from Apple covered the cost of operating PARC for its entire lifetime. The laser printer, similarly, generated enough revenue to fund all of the R&D from PARC.
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I think you swiftly find that the companies who try to rest on a single product line and stifle competition are eventually squashed. As hard as they try to keep alternatives off the market, they will fail. And when those alternatives come to market, they have a problem. That is why google spends so much time and energy on R&D. It isn't because they expect to turn a profit on every idea tomorrow, it's because 1) they need to support their ad model and driving more consumers to goole via all of these fancy expensive things gives them more revenue and 2) because they want to start working on finding other markets (fiber rollout?) before their business model is taken over or superseded.
"So, after decades of careful deliberation, never rushing to judgment, the ACM has decided that the PC and the LAN were significant ideas worthy of recognition. Does this put Tim Berners-Lee in the mix for the award circa 2030?"
-- a [anonymous] colleague
This is why we need to support research institutions and labs! With the attitude that advances and inventions must be immediately profitable, this will drastically limit innovation. We need companies and institutions taking a long term view and not just look at the short term balance sheet. Otherwise our innovations will be reduced to whatever can be quickly productized and what the current consumer fashions dictate.
The majority of the modern computing technology, including the average home computer, laptop, peripherals, network, browser, software, phones, etc, was born from universities, research institutions, and corporate labs.
At least Apple copied the stuff with permission, which the Anti-Apple crowd conveniently never mentions.
Paraphrasing Chris Rock: ;))
Of course we don’t. It’s like bragging that you never murdered somebody. You’re not supposed to murder somebody, dumbass!!
What we mention, is that Microsoft did it without permission (and got sued for it). Which you conveniently didn’t mention.
Any sufficiently advanced intelligence is indistinguishable from stupidity.
They were also in the mainframe business. I learned to program on a Xerox Sigma 7.