Charles Thacker wins Turing Award

Published 11 March 2010

Inventor Charles Thacker wins computer industry’s most prestigious award for his contributions to the field; Thacker built a prototype of a desktop computer, called the Alto, which featured a number of innovations that have since become commonplace: a television-like screen, a graphical user interface, and a WYSIWYG text editor; Thacker was also co-inventor of the Ethernet networking technology

Give credit where credit is due. The Association for Computing Machinery (ACM) has awarded the 2009 A. M. Turing Award to Charles P. Thacker for his work in pioneering the networked personal computer.

In 1974, while at the Xerox PARC (Palo Alto Research Center), Thacker built a prototype of a desktop computer, called the Alto. It featured a number of innovations that have since become commonplace on PCs, including a television-like screen, a graphical user interface, and a WYSIWYG (what-you-see-is-what-you-get) text editor. Thacker, 67, was also co-inventor of the Ethernet networking technology for connecting computers, which is still widely used.

IDG’s Joab Jackson quotes Charles Simonyi, who worked with Thacker at PARC and contributed software to the Alto, to say that “The Alto was an amazing accomplishment.” Simonyi later went on to head up Microsoft’s application software group. “The idea was to design something for the future, when the component prices came down. And that worked perfectly: The prices did come down and the design was correct.”

The ACM president, Wendy Hall, said that Thacker is “one of the most distinguished computer systems engineers in the history of the field” and that his innovations have “profoundly affected the course of modern computing.”

In an interview with Jackson, Thacker recalled that the Alto development was led both by himself — he handled the hardware side — and Butler Lampson, who developed the software. The original prototype cost $12,000. “This was a time in which $12,000 was a lot of money,” he said.

The researchers saw the appeal immediately. Simonyi said PARC employees and associates would sneak in at night to use the Alto to carry out mundane tasks like assembling Parent-Teacher Association newsletters or writing up a Ph.D. thesis. “It was the first computer used by non-computer people for their own personal ends,” he said.

The innovation was not limited to the computer itself. “We had a system. We had the computers, the network, the laser printers and the servers all hooked up together,” Thacker said. “That was the real benefit in my mind, that we were able to put together an entire system.”

Jackson notes that the award also recognizes Thacker’s work in helping develop Ethernet, as well as his early prototypes of the multiprocessor workstation and the tablet personal computer. The secret to staying innovative? “You try to hire people who are smarter than you are,” he said.

In another interview Tuesday, Thacker said: “I was flabbergasted…. I frankly never expected to get the award, because it wasn’t given to people like me. Most of the people who have gotten the Turing award in the past few years are software people or theoreticians. There are scant few people who have actually built some hardware.”

Today, Thacker studies computer architecture at Microsoft Research, at the company’s Silicon Valley campus. He holds twenty-nine patents in computer systems and networking.

Since 1966 the ACM has bestowed the Turing Award, named after British mathematician and computer pioneer Alan M. Turning, on computer scientists and engineers who have made great strides in advancing the frontier of computer science. The award is funded by Google Inc. and Intel Corp.

Other recipients of the award, which ACM describes as the Nobel Prize in Computing, include Donald Knuth, Alan Kay, Vinton Cerf., Robert Kahn, and Doug Engelbart, the inventor of the computer mouse.

Thacker will be awarded a $250,000 prize and will be honored in a banquet to be held in June in San Francisco. Thacker said he would probably donate the money to his alma mater, the University of California, Berkeley.