Stephen Withers
Wednesday, 10 March 2010 15:59
IT People -
People
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Chuck Thacker, co-inventor of Ethernet and now a technical fellow at Microsoft Research has received the AM Turing Award.
The Turing Award is given for contributions of lasting and major technical importance to the computer field. It is generally regarded as the equivalent of the Nobel Prize for computing, and carries a $US250,000 prize supported by Intel and Google.
The award usually goes to computer scientists, and Thacker is only the second person to be honoured for actually designing and building computer equipment.
The first was Maurice Wilkes, who received the award for designing and building the first computer with internally stored programs, and the co-developer of the concept of program libraries.
Thacker received the 2009 AM Turing award from the Association of Computing Machinery "For the pioneering design and realization of the first modern personal computer -- the Alto at Xerox PARC -- and seminal inventions and contributions to local area networks (including the Ethernet), multiprocessor workstations, snooping cache coherence protocols, and tablet personal computers."
The full citation reads: "Charles P. (Chuck) Thacker is a pioneering architect, inventor, designer, and builder of many of today's key personal computing and network technologies. During the 70s and early 80s at the Xerox Palo Alto Research Center, Chuck was a central systems designer and main pragmatic engineering force behind many of PARC's technologies, including: Alto, the first modern personal computer with a bit-map screen to run graphical user interfaces with WYSIWYG fidelity and interaction. All of today's personal computers with bit-map screens and graphical user interfaces descend directly from the Alto."
The citation continues on
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