14 DAY TRIAL // In 1979, while touring Xerox's laboratory, Xerox PARC, Microsoft chairman Bill Gates came across the Alto, the first computer to sport a graphical user interface. It was the Alto, and its icon-based GUI that inspired the subsequent Windows user interface, ubiquitous today.
While never commercially available, the Alto drastically influenced the evolution of the personal computer, with key concepts that have shaped PCs for years to come being created by Chuck Thacker, a pioneer in computer science. Now a technical fellow with Microsoft Research, Thacker has been honored with the Association for Computing Machinery’s highest accolade the A.M. Turing Award.
“It’s very gratifying,” Thacker notes. “When people say, ‘What have you done for Microsoft lately?’ I say: ‘You don’t understand. The most impact I’ve had on Microsoft was work that was done before Microsoft even existed, when Bill [Gates] was in short pants. PCs didn’t get to be as good as the Alto for about 12 years. It took a lot of work on software and a lot of hardware progress before they got on a par with scientific workstations. But they had one major advantage, and that was that Moore’s Law was on their side.”
The Turing Award is considered the equivalent of the Nobel Prize of computing, and comes with a prize of $250,000. While the prestigious honor is generally reserved for conceptual or theoretical work, Thacker got the award for his work in designing and building computer machinery. Thacker helped develop additional innovations that changed the world including the Ethernet, laser printing and the Tablet PC.
“Chuck is surely one of the most distinguished computer-systems engineers in the history of the field,” stated Butler Lampson, a Microsoft Research New England technical fellow and a Turing Award winner. “Chuck is an engineer’s engineer. His skills span the full range, from analog-circuit and power-supply design through logic design, processor and network architecture, system software, languages, and applications as varied as CAD and electronic books, all the way to user-interface design.”