ACM Awards 2009 Turing Prize To Alto Creator Charles Thacker 49
scumm writes "This year's Turing Prize has been awarded to Charles Thacker, whom they describe as (among other things) the 'creator of the first modern personal computer.' From the ACM's announcement: 'ACM, the Association for Computing Machinery today named Charles P. Thacker the winner of the 2009 ACM A.M. Turing Award for his pioneering design and realization of the Alto, the first modern personal computer, and the prototype for networked personal computers. Thacker's design, which he built while at Xerox PARC (Palo Alto Research Center), reflected a new vision of a self-sufficient, networked computer on every desk, equipped with innovations that are standard in today's models. Thacker was also cited for his contributions to the Ethernet local area network, which enables multiple computers to communicate and share resources, as well as the first multiprocessor workstation, and the prototype for today's most used tablet PC, with its capabilities for direct user interaction.' For further reading, the Wall Street Journal has an article providing more background about Mr. Thacker and the Turing Prize. In the spirit of full disclosure, the submitter feels compelled to point out that this Mr. Thacker is his uncle, and that he thinks this is really cool."
xPad? xPhone? (Score:4, Interesting)
What I find more fascinating, it that despite all these ground-breaking developments, Xerox never was able to capitalize on them.
We could be all working on xPads and squawking in xPhones now.
I'm still scratching my head on this failure. Management error? Naw, can't be that.
This is amazingly deserved. (Score:5, Interesting)
I'm tickled pink.
His contributions are inspiring; in fact playing with an Alto so many years ago was the first time I got to mess with a graphics display and mouse, if only on an occasional basis for a few hours.
And I had a chance to work with Chuck a bit: he's great people, and has continued to do first class stuff ever since.
Re:xPad? xPhone? (Score:2, Interesting)
What I find more fascinating, it that despite all these ground-breaking developments, Xerox never was able to capitalize on them.
We could be all working on xPads and squawking in xPhones now.
I'm still scratching my head on this failure. Management error? Naw, can't be that.
For one thing, Xerox was in the paper-photocopy business. I've heard that its management didn't really understand the business model (hell, nobody did, except for Bill Gates) an those that did feared that a "paperless office" would result from the replacement of typewriters and file cabinets. (Yeah, right.)
Also, as innovative as Xerox's projects were, they were research projects first and marketable products second. They lacked the refinement and consumer focus (eg. user testing, industrial design) that Apple's and eventually Microsoft's products had.
Re:xPad? xPhone? (Score:4, Interesting)
Management absolutely. "We're a copier company. Why are you working on this crazy crap?"
At least Apple copied the stuff with permission, which the Anti-Apple crowd conveniently never mentions. Xerox management didn't care and basically let them have it cheap.
Re:xPad? xPhone? (Score:4, Interesting)
In a way, they probably capitalized more by not developing them. Established companies tend to grow by hiring people with useful skills, and then only utilizing them for about 5% of their productive day. The rest of the time, they sit around over-paid and under-employed, thinking of ways to improve the business.
But actually implementing any of those changes would be prohibitively expensive in a company that has 20x more employees than it needs. And, for a long period, longer than the patent protection perhaps, the marginal benefit of the new technology is so much less than the profit generated by the established tech that it isn't even worth trying to productize. So, yeah, you could say poor management but it's really more of a strategic decision to capitalize on a core technology and stifle alternatives rather than driving innovations into the market.
Examples abound in every industry, autos, energy. Take Google, for instance: tons of money made on basically just little text ads. And that's used to fund all sorts of interesting research that will never make them a dime. The number of employees grows. The stock goes up. The core business never changes. Dividends are never paid. Investors never benefit from 90% of the profits which are spent on employees sitting around innovating technologies that are never used.
Re:xPad? xPhone? (Score:3, Interesting)