Computing organizations, like groups in other disciplines, regularly hand out awards to pioneers who helped shape the field. Charles Thacker certainly did that, but didn’t stop there.
The Association for Computing Machinery on Tuesday is naming Thacker the latest recipient of the A.M. Turing award, which comes with $250,000 and carries prestige akin to a Nobel Prize in the industry. Thacker is being recognized largely for the Alto, a machine developed in 1974 at Xerox’s famed Palo Alto Research Center that is often called the world’s first personal computer. The ACM is also citing Thacker’s contributions at Xerox PARC to the invention of Ethernet–the most widely used technology for local networks–as well as work on tablet-style computers since becoming a researcher at Microsoft in the 1990s.
“This guy is a real genius,” says Alan Kay, a researcher who worked with Thacker at PARC and a fellow Turing award winner. “We don’t like to sling that word around in our field, but he is one. He is magic.”
Thacker says the manager in the 1970s at Xerox PARC, Bob Taylor, was a psychologist who inspired scientists there to pursue a broad vision of computers as devices that could transform documents and other communications media. But to most people at the time they were a lot less inspiring, managed largely by interacting with green-screen terminals that could only display simple text.
Thacker, who is 67, says his work to fulfill Taylor’s vision was aided by advances such as dynamic random-access memory chips–pioneered by Intel–which could store data temporarily at a lower cost than prior technologies. That allowed the PARC team to equip the Alto with what came to be known as “bit-mapped” computer displays; these could render more complex images, such as pages with text in multiple fonts that looked like paper documents. The display technology was the foundation of the Alto’s graphical user interface, a software technology that would later be a distinguishing feature of Apple’s Macintosh and Microsoft Windows.
Another key invention at PARC was the first laser printer, an outgrowth of Xerox’s heritage in document-handling. Ethernet, Thacker recalls, was largely dreamed up as a way to help the Alto send files to the new device for printing. “We really wanted to use that printer,” he says.
(Another inflential figure at Xerox PARC who played a major role in the design of the Alto, Butler Lampson, was awarded the Turing prize in 1992; he is also now at Microsoft).
After leaving PARC in 1983, Thacker helped start a new lab for Digital Equipment Corp. in Palo Alto, where he spent 13 years. He later joined Microsoft–first at a lab started in Cambridge, England, and subsequently at a lab the software giant set up in Silicon Valley lab, where he remains.
Thacker’s chores in the 1990s included working on the company’s version of a tablet computer, which in those days was seen mainly as a device that could be used to take notes with a pen-style pointing device. After suffering a series of stumbles, Microsoft managed to work many of the bugs out of such devices–which now offer handwriting recognition in the range of 92% accuracy, Thacker estimates–and convinced computer makers to make and sell them. “I totally credit him with the resurrection of the tablet,” says Gordon Bell, another well-known computer researcher who started at DEC and now works for Microsoft.
But tablets have so far largely been confined to specialized business applications. “We saw nothing like the hockey-stick growth we thought would happen,” Thacker says. (He declines to express an opinion yet about Apple’s iPad. “I haven’t figured it out,” he says).
Thacker’s most celebrated contribution in recent years stems from economic and technological changes in the electronics industry. The phenomenon known as Moore’s Law, an oft-quoted aphorism for how quickly chip makers shrink their circuitry, is good for buyers of those products but causes problems for people who want to develop and test new computer designs.
Creating chips using the latest manufacturing process now can take years and millions of dollars. “It’s too expensive to build the kind of hardware we used to,” Thacker says.
But Moore’s Law simultaneously helped provide a solution. The trend has boosted the capability of chips known as FPGAs–field programmable gate arrays–which companies use as an alternative to designing chips from scratch for some kinds of applications.
Thacker was urged to exploit the technology by David Patterson, a computer scientist at the University of California at Berkeley (Thacker’s alma mater). Microsoft helped fund the development of what is called Bee3, for Berkeley Emulation Engine–which is essentially a circuit board with four FPGA chips that can be programmed to act like a parallel computer to allow students to develop and test computer designs. Thacker says 100 of the systems are in use at leading universities that work on hardware designs, and the technology is also being used by Microsoft research.
“His most recent project is one of his most significant,” says Patterson of Thacker. “He’s not a guy who has ever thought about retiring.”
The Turing award is named for Alan Turing, a British mathematician and computing pioneer who is credited with helping Allied forces crack the German Enigma code during World War II. One of the other notable aspects to Thacker winning the prize is the fact that he is a hardware specialist; since Maurice Wilkes won the award in 1967, recipients have primarily been known for achievements in software or other aspects of computing.
“I never expected to get this award,” Thacker says. “I was just flabbergasted.”