Xerox Alto Designer Wins Turing Award
American computer pioneer Chuck Thacker, currently working at Microsoft’s development labs, has been awarded the prestigious Turing Award. Thacker was one of the founders of the Alto, the first modern PC.
The Turing Award is awarded annually, along with a cash prize of $250,000, to individuals who have made significant technical contributions to computer science and has been described as the Nobel Prize in computer science. This year, 67-year-old Chuck Thacker was chosen because of his contribution to the development of the personal computer.
Thacker had been with Xerox since 1974, conducting research at the Palo Alto Research Center. He built an experimental desktop computer called Alto. A large number of parts that he used with the Alto can be found in later PCs, such as a separate CRT screen, expandable working memory and a mouse. In addition, the device was able to communicate with other computers through the Ethernet port. The prototype cost about $12,000 at the time.
In a interview Thacker told The New York Times that his team at Xerox at the time saw the consequences of the rapid evolution of microchips, as described in Moore’s Law, quickly: “We knew this was going to be something really big, if it took a while. at least ten years before everything became affordable”.
In addition to the hardware, the Alto PC also had the first graphical user interface, including icons and windows that we are used to in current operating systems. In addition, one of the first email clients, wysiwyg editors and multiplayer games were developed for the Alto. Xerox never released the Alto and soon regretted it when Apple ran a few ideas and successfully launched the Macintosh in the early 1980s.
Thacker, along with other researchers, founded the Systems Research Center, part of the Digital Equipment Corporation, in 1983. There he developed computers based on the DEC Alpha system. In 1997, he did something similar for Microsoft, founding the Cambridge-based Microsoft Research Lab in the UK. There, the researcher focused mainly on the first Tablet PC, a computer that never really became successful for various reasons. And remarkably enough, Apple again seems to have developed a very similar product with its iPad that could become a commercial success.
Thacker is now experimenting at Microsoft with multicore systems in which the processors used have up to 15 cores. With the experimental hardware, the software giant wants to develop new devices and write software that can better handle multicore devices. Thacker also thinks that multi-core processors are the right way to build more powerful and economical systems in the future.