It’s not often that a hardware expert gets the Turing Award, in fact it has only happened once before, but this year it goes to computer scientist Charles Thacker.
Thacker is currently a researcher with Microsoft but his portfolio extends back to the 1970’s.
He has been accredited with helping to design and build what we now consider to be the first ever modern personal computer. Whilst with Xerox his work led to the development of Alto, which had a screen, and a graphical user interface.
He was the co inventor of the Ethernet technology which is still widely used for networking computers today.
Thacker was involved in developing the early prototypes of desktop work stations and the tablet PC and has 29 patents in computer and networking systems under his belt.
The Turing award is named after Alan M Turing the British Mathematician and is funded by Intel and Google. This “Nobel prize in computing” is awarded to those who have made outstanding contributions to the field of computer science.
“Google is pleased to join in honouring Charles Thacker for his far-reaching role in the birth of one of the most important technologies in the 20th century,” said Alfred Spector, Vice President of Research and Special Initiatives at Google Inc.
“His contributions made possible the style of computing that we enjoy today, and we are proud to be a sponsor of the ACM Turing Award to encourage continued research in computer science, and the related technologies that depend on its continued advancement.”
Past recipients of the award have included Douglas Engelbert in 1997 for future interactive technologies and inventions (computer mouse), Alan Kay in 2003 for ideas the root of object orientated programming languages and Vinton Cerf and Robert Kahn in 2004 for Internetworking.
Thacker will receive a $250,000 prize and will attend a special banquet in June but he said he would probably donate the money to the University of California, Berkeley.
On hearing the news “I was flabbergasted” said Thacker in an interview.
“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.”
It’s well deserved Mr Thacker.
