Microsoft Veteran Thacker Scores Turing Award

Some of the most significant pieces of today’s computing infrastructure grew out of projects born at Xerox’s Palo Alto Research Center. So perhaps it’s only fitting that the Association for Computing Machinery selected one PARC’s founders as the latest winner of the Turing Prize, the most prestigious award in the field of computer science.

Datamation has the story on Turing Award recipient Chuck Thacker, currently a Microsoft researcher, and takes a look at some of the past luminaries who have been honored by the Nobel Prize for computing.


It’s been a long time coming for Chuck Thacker.

The veteran computing researcher, who currently works for Microsoft Research in the Silicon Valley, was honored this week as the 2009 winner of the Association for Computing Machinery’s (ACM) A.M. Turing Award, the most prestigious accolade that a computer scientist can receive.

Thacker, one of the founding computer researchers at Xerox’s famed Palo Alto Research Center (PARC) in the early 1970s. He is widely credited with engineering the hardware for the Xerox Alto, which was arguably the first personal computer. He also helped co-invent the Ethernet protocol during his 13 years at the lab.

All told, the work done by researchers at PARC led directly to today’s electronic office, with impacts including the Apple Mac and Microsoft (NASDAQ: MSFT) Windows, WYSIWYG graphical editing, tablet computing, and many others.



Read the full story at Datamation:



Microsoft Researcher Wins Computing’s ‘Nobel’

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