Microsoft researcher wins Turing Award, computing's Nobel Prize |
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Charles Thacker
Charles Thacker, a Microsoft Research technical fellow, this morning was named the recipient of the Turing Award, considered the Nobel Prize of computing, for his work designing the early Alto personal computer during his time at the Xerox Palo Alto Research Center.
Thacker's design "reflected a new vision of a self-sufficient, networked computer on every desk, equipped with innovations that are standard in today's models," the Association for Computing Machinery said this morning in the news release announcing the award. ACM also cited Thacker's work on Ethernet local area networks.
Video on the early Xerox Alto computer
The Turing Award comes with $250,000 prize money, with funding from Intel and Google. Thacker, now 67, says in a story on Microsoft's website that the award was a surprise. Mary Jo Foley of ZDNet.com profiled Thacker last year as part of her "Big Brains" series on Microsoft's technical fellows.
Research at Xerox PARC heavily influenced the design of early personal computers, and the evolution of the industry, as reflected in this guest essay today on the Technologizer blog by early Microsoft Windows manager Tandy Trower.
"The similarities between the (Apple and Microsoft) products were largely due to the fact that both Windows and Macintosh has common ancestors, that being many of the earlier windowing systems such as those like Alto and Star that were created at Xerox PARC," writes Trower.
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