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Xerox Alto Designer, Co-Inventor Of Ethernet, Dies at 74 (arstechnica.com)

Posted by EditorDavid on from the Alto-from-Palo-Alto dept.

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."

38 of 96 comments (clear)

  1. Re:RIP. by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 1

    I met him once. He was friends with the CEO of the company I worked for back around 2003-ish. Interesting man with lots of stories about PARC.

  2. There's this amazing series of videos by 50000BTU_barbecue · · Score: 4, Informative

    https://www.youtube.com/watch?...

    I quite enjoy this.

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    Mostly random stuff.
  3. Re: Sad, but... by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 3, Informative

    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.

  4. Good man by 110010001000 · · Score: 2

    We graduated college together. Always a nice guy.

    1. Re:Good man by iggymanz · · Score: 1

      you're funny AC, like anyone even gives a crap about YOU here while you're alive! hahahahaha

  5. Re: Sad, but... by iggymanz · · Score: 3, Insightful

    that first version could go up to 500 meters before repeater needed, tell me how far your twisted pair can go

  6. Predicting the Future is Easy by pubwvj · · Score: 1

    "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.

  7. Re:RIP. by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 2, Interesting

    No. Elon Musk isn't anything like Charles Thacker. Thacker was an inspired inventor, designer and engineer.

    Musk just throws money behind generic ideas that have tons of prior art. This is much like Steve Jobs, Larry Ellison, Jeff Bezos and others of that ilk -- they are good at monetizing and marketing, but they are not very creative.

  8. Re:RIP. by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 1

    But they make products that people want to own and use. On the other hand, Thacker created shit that no one wanted but nerds furiously jack off their micropeens over.

  9. Ethernet and Robert Metcalf by woboyle · · Score: 4, Interesting

    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.

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    Sometimes, real fast is almost as good as real-time.
    1. Re:Ethernet and Robert Metcalf by unixisc · · Score: 1

      I used to read Bob Metcalfe's articles in InfoWorld. They used to be some of the most insightful opinions in that magazine.

    2. Re:Ethernet and Robert Metcalf by woboyle · · Score: 1

      So did I, and I agree.

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      Sometimes, real fast is almost as good as real-time.
  10. Re: Sad, but... by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 1

    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)

  11. Re: RIP. by K.+S.+Kyosuke · · Score: 1

    Musk is somewhere in the middle between the two extremes. Comparing him to Jobs is highly disingenuous.

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    Ezekiel 23:20
  12. Re:RIP. by unixisc · · Score: 1

    More precisely, Musk gets government to heavily subsidize his companies, particularly SpaceX. That's very different from what people like Thacker used to do

    RIP, Mr Thacker

  13. Re:RIP. by unixisc · · Score: 1

    So how many people use SpaceX? Even for the Tesla - how many people prefer that to the Toyotas or Hondas?

  14. ethernet by unixisc · · Score: 1

    On the firmware side of things, I wish he had made the Ethernet Mac address 64 bits instead of 48.

    1. Re:ethernet by glitch! · · Score: 1

      On the firmware side of things, I wish he had made the Ethernet Mac address 64 bits instead of 48.

      Your opinion interests me. Could you go further? If I remember right, the numbering registry assigns a block of 24 bits (16M each) and very large manufacturers just buy more blocks as needed. I am sure that a lot of startups will buy a block and only sell a fraction (I was involved with one), but that does leave 16M blocks to sell. Wow, that's a lot. And I think it is likely that some rogue vendors steal blocks, just thinking the odds are miniscule that any customer will see an ARP conflict.

      Maybe you are looking at the cost of a modern processor loading, masking, and doing small-endian conversion based on 48 bits versus 64 bits? Yes, there are a few more machine instructions there, but... Didn't we stop worrying about the cost per packet (well, frame) some years ago? The modern CPU is so capable, it could maybe do ATM AAL5 in software and we would not notice the overhead.

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      A dingo ate my sig...
    2. Re:ethernet by unixisc · · Score: 1

      You mentioned that very large manufacturers buy up variable length blocks. My idea here was having out of 64 bits, say 8 bits (to allow for 256 ethernet manufacturers worldwide) to have a constant block of addresses. Which they could assign according to their product lines. I don't know if 802.11 shares the same MAC addressing schemes as 802.3, but a company that made both Ethernet and WiFi parts could use different internal schemes to identify the parts. It would also have made autoconfiguration more automatic, as opposed to having EUI-64 (which inserts 0xfffe in the middle), and the end result would have been MAC addresses being more reliably unique than what it is now.

      I wasn't thinking so much about the endian conversions or any of that. As it is, EUI-64 in IPv6 is only used in link-local addresses (on this TrueOS system that I'm using). Usually, they'll either use Privacy Extensions, which is what Windows uses, or they'd use RAs. So no, I wasn't thinking about the CPU trying to align 48 bits and 64 bits.

  15. Re:RIP. by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 1

    Hey, 12-year-old. Get a sense of history and origin.

    The windows and icons and on your smartphone and Ipad were conceived by Thacker and his PARC coworkers, while clicking on them was enabled by earlier inventors such as Ralph Benjamin and Douglas Engelbart.

    Without these Jobs, Ellison, Bezos and Musk would have been selling something else, and you would be angering your parents by hogging the household phone chattering with other preteens.

  16. Re:RIP. by squiggleslash · · Score: 1

    But Musk invented the Hyperloop! The Hyperloop! The single greatest form of transportation that'll never exist and would be totally shit if it really happened but gives NIMBYs a FUD strategy to help them kill HSR proposals!

    --
    You are not alone. This is not normal. None of this is normal.
  17. co-inventor by aquabat · · Score: 1

    Did they have to say "co-inventor" because of that Al Gore thing?

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    A republic cannot succeed till it contains a certain body of men imbued with the principles of justice and honour.
    1. Re:co-inventor by aquabat · · Score: 1

      ugh. I need to read more carefully before trying to be a smartass. Cancel my last.

      --
      A republic cannot succeed till it contains a certain body of men imbued with the principles of justice and honour.
    2. Re:co-inventor by Desler · · Score: 1

      Your post was bad and you should feel bad for making it.

  18. Ethernet? by plopez · · Score: 1

    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.

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    putting the 'B' in LGBTQ+
    1. Re: Ethernet? by plopez · · Score: 1

      Ummm no. It was the mother of ethernet. And much of what we call WiFi protocols as well. Not everything is invented in Silly Valley. Start reading up on ALOHA and AlohaNet. The impact it had was huge.

      --
      putting the 'B' in LGBTQ+
  19. Re: RIP. by plopez · · Score: 1

    I'd rather eye fuck them. But respectfully. With cuddling.

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    putting the 'B' in LGBTQ+
  20. Re:RIP. by plopez · · Score: 1

    That's why large companies buy them. Risk free innovation

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    putting the 'B' in LGBTQ+
  21. Re: RIP. by dougdonovan · · Score: 1

    ditto on RIP

  22. um... by sootman · · Score: 1

    "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....?

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    Dear Slashdot: next time you want to mess with the site, add a rich-text editor for comments.
    1. Re:um... by dbIII · · Score: 1

      And Xerox didn't sell it for those intervening 15 years because....?

      Because it wasn't a copier and management was too risk averse to go into the business of selling computers.
      It's really annoying that tiny (at the time obviously) startups like Apple and Microsoft did more with what would have been less than Xerox's coffee budget than Xerox did.

  23. Re: Sad, but... by iggymanz · · Score: 1

    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.

  24. Re:RIP. by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 1

    at least he's not this fucking tool: https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2017/06/shivas-war-one-mans-quest-to-convince-the-world-that-he-invented-e-mail/

  25. Re: RIP. by K.+S.+Kyosuke · · Score: 1

    Virtually everything that has ever been invented had been conceived by somebody else before. Try again. :-p

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    Ezekiel 23:20
  26. Re: RIP. by K.+S.+Kyosuke · · Score: 1

    Ideas are cheap, though. That's why your statement applies to all inventors. Falcon 9 might not be the first design geared for unified serial production to have ever been conceived - see OTRAG, for example - but it's the first one to have actually taken off, so as to speak.

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    Ezekiel 23:20
  27. Re:RIP. by K.+S.+Kyosuke · · Score: 1

    Maybe you should cite it. Vactrains were known as a concept back then, but the original hyperloop concept was not a vactrain. (It seems to have sort of turned into one, though.)

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    Ezekiel 23:20
  28. That sucks by tezbobobo · · Score: 1

    Could we edit the title to at least include his name - credit where it is due.

  29. I was confused... by wkwilley2 · · Score: 1

    Based on the summary, I initially thought this guys name was Xerox Alta.

    I thought to myself, "that's such a badass name."

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    Have you ever fallen asleep at the keybhanusdiog?