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."

Comments

xPad? xPhone?

[PolygamousRanchKid]

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.

This is amazingly deserved.

[jg]

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.
 

Re:This is amazingly deserved.

[Peter Simpson]

Seconded. Poor Xerox...they had so much and never used it.

I saw a networked Star (Alto's child) in 1993 when I visited a friend at MIT. After seeing it, Windows 3.1 was quite a disappointment! All I wanted was a UNIX system. Luckily, Linus Torvalds did, too.

Re:xPad? xPhone?

[Anonymous Coward]

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.

Re:xPad? xPhone?

[Megane]

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.

Re:xPad? xPhone?

[benjamindees]

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.

Wikipedia

[mcgrew]

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:

Charles P. (Chuck) Thacker is a technical fellow and computer pioneer.

Thacker received his B.S. in physics from the University of California, Berkeley in 1967 and then joined the university's "Project Genie" in 1968, which led to a very successful early timesharing system. Butler Lampson, Thacker, and others then left to form the Berkeley Computer Corporation, where Thacker designed the processor and memory system. While BCC was not commercially successful, this group became the core technologists in the Computer Systems Laboratory at Xerox Palo Alto Research Center (PARC).[1]

Thacker worked in the 1970s and 1980s at the PARC, where he served as project leader of the Xerox Alto personal computer system, was co-inventor of the Ethernet LAN, and contributed to many other projects, including the first laser printer.

In 1983, Thacker was a founder of the Systems Research Center (SRC) at Digital Equipment Corporation (DEC), and in 1997, he joined Microsoft Research to help establish Microsoft's research lab in Cambridge, United Kingdom.

After returning to the United States, Thacker designed the hardware for Microsoft's Tablet PC, based on his experience with the "interim Dynabook" at PARC, and later the Lectrice, a pen-based hand-held computer at DEC SRC.

In 1994 he was inducted as a Fellow of the Association for Computing Machinery.

In 1996 he was named a Distinguished Alumni in Computer Science at U.C. Berkeley. [2]

In 2004, he won the Charles Stark Draper Prize together with Alan C. Kay, Butler W. Lampson, and Robert W. Taylor.

In 2007 he won the IEEE John von Neumann medal for "a central role in the creation of the personal computer and the development of networked computer systems."

In 2010 he was named by the Association for Computing Machinery as the recipient of the 2009 Turing Award[3][4] in recognition of his pioneering design and realization of the Alto (computer), the first modern personal computer, and in addition for his contributions to the Ethernet and the Tablet PC.

Thacker holds an honorary doctorate from the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology and is a Technical fellow at Microsoft.

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.

Re:xPad? xPhone?

[TheRaven64]

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.