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Xerox Alto Designer, Co-Inventor Of Ethernet, Dies at 74 (arstechnica.com)
An anonymous reader quotes Ars Technica:
Charles Thacker, one of the lead hardware designers on the Xerox Alto, the first modern personal computer, died of a brief illness on Monday. He was 74. The Alto, which was released in 1973 but was never a commercial success, was an incredibly influential machine... Thomas Haigh, a computer historian and professor at the University of Wisconsin, Milwaukee, wrote in an email to Ars, "Alto is the direct ancestor of today's personal computers. It provided the model: GUI, windows, high-resolution screen, Ethernet, mouse, etc. that the computer industry spent the next 15 years catching up to. Of course others like Alan Kay and Butler Lampson spent years evolving the software side of the platform, but without Thacker's creation of what was, by the standards of the early 1970s, an amazingly powerful personal hardware platform, none of that other work would have been possible."
In 1999 Thacker also designed the hardware for Microsoft's Tablet PC, "which was first conceived of by his PARC colleague Alan Kay during the early 1970s," according to the article. "I've found over my career that it's been very difficult to predict the future," Thacker said in a guest lecture in 2013. "People who tried to do it generally wind up being wrong."
In 1999 Thacker also designed the hardware for Microsoft's Tablet PC, "which was first conceived of by his PARC colleague Alan Kay during the early 1970s," according to the article. "I've found over my career that it's been very difficult to predict the future," Thacker said in a guest lecture in 2013. "People who tried to do it generally wind up being wrong."
I am only passingly familiar with the man, but I suppose he was that generation's Elon Musk.
Man! People are dying young these days!
Massive connector? Are you kidding me?
https://www.youtube.com/watch?...
I quite enjoy this.
Mostly random stuff.
The Ethernet AUI interface was DB15, and the other side of the transceiver was a vampire tape into coaxial cable. Ethernet over twisted pair came much later, and it was based on existing telephone cable and connectors.
We graduated college together. Always a nice guy.
that first version could go up to 500 meters before repeater needed, tell me how far your twisted pair can go
"I've found over my career that it's been very difficult to predict the future," Thacker said in a guest lecture in 2013. "People who tried to do it generally wind up being wrong."
Oh, come now. Predicting the future is easy. The future will be just like the present but different. See, easy-peasy.
Hey, Silly Valley hypsters! HE was an innovative genius. He just wasn't so famous because he didn't have a publicist keeping his name out there all the time.
It's aggravating seeing much lesser talents become billionaires while people like Thacker stay in relative obscurity.
Google it!
Compared to your's and Trump's micropenises? Yeah, it's yuge!
The co-inventor of ethernet at PARC, Robert Metcalf, has been a friend of mine for 35 years. My sympathies to Thacker's family for their loss. I never knew him although I may have met him in the early 1980's in the Silicon Valley. As a commercial computer sales rep in the Valley back then I sold Robert the first 100 IBM PC's for his startup, 3-com. When I was an engineer in Boston in the late 1980's and early 1990's we would meet for dinner before IEEE meetings.
Sometimes, real fast is almost as good as real-time.
that first version could go up to 500 meters before repeater needed, tell me how far your twisted pair can go
It can go up to 10Gbps.
Any other questions?
(PARC alumnus here)
On the firmware side of things, I wish he had made the Ethernet Mac address 64 bits instead of 48.
that first version could go up to 500 meters before repeater needed, tell me how far your twisted pair can go
100 meters
It can go up to 10Gbps.
Any other questions?
(PARC alumnus here)
Fuck?! You?!
Did they have to say "co-inventor" because of that Al Gore thing?
A republic cannot succeed till it contains a certain body of men imbued with the principles of justice and honour.
Doug Englebart and the mother of all demos. PARC invented nothing.
Fuck?! You?!
No. You still haven't made any sense.
The reason we decided to ditch our original interface was because it was a complete dead end in terms of throughput.
Nobody has 500m+ runs in buildings... But everyone needs more speed.
But thanks for playing, idiot. Maybe that's why you haven't worked at PARC?!?!?!
Ethernet was based on AlohaNet developed at the University of Hawaii. It was built to provide network communications to data centers across the islands. They used shortwave radios to send packets across the ether to each other. When I was an undergrad we actually studied AlohaNet in my OS class.
Maybe he refined it but he didn't invent it.
putting the 'B' in LGBTQ+
"It provided the model... that the computer industry spent the next 15 years catching up to."
And Xerox didn't sell it for those intervening 15 years because....?
Dear Slashdot: next time you want to mess with the site, add a rich-text editor for comments.
Since we're doing history, let me introduce you to a part of it
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=o4-YnLpLgtk
About the same time period as the Alto (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lisp_machine)
And there was no Jobs, Ellison, or Musk to do to the above like they did with {https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uVCxfoG8bv4} this which is currently the number two desktop OS. So pioneer he may have been, but without the rest we'd still be at DOS levels.
No AlohaNet was not particularly novel or important even in it's own time. Among protocol designers its largely an amusing application of literal hopping from island to island not unlike how amusing it would be for physicists to actually find an implementation of a spherical cow. How that was done was chosen from existing methods and then implemented. Nothing novel. Nothing new.
I know historical revisionism is all the rage, particularly if you get to stick it to the evil Haoles, but racism is not a reasonable excuse for the obfuscation of history and the robbery of a great man's legacy. Particularly so when we are discussing his death.
oh yes instead of fiber it was more economical to use coaxial ethernet (and Arcnet) and repeaters for large building and campus/site runs back in the day.
Amazing, someone from PARC comments and the obscenities start flying ?
Respect to anyone who's worked at PARC, or who worked on Ethernet, the laser printer, and GUI etc.
Me again,
I wonder if the teams at PARC imagined the cutting edge stuff they were working on would in the not too distant future be so common place and affordable that the average person would have this stuff in their homes?
If you want to know about Thacker's and PARC's travails, read this book: https://www.amazon.com/Fumbling-Future-Invented-Personal-Computer/dp/1583482660
Could we edit the title to at least include his name - credit where it is due.
Based on the summary, I initially thought this guys name was Xerox Alta.
I thought to myself, "that's such a badass name."
Have you ever fallen asleep at the keybhanusdiog?