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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."
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
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.
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.