2009 Turing Award
March 11th, 2010 | Published in Uncategorized
Charles P. Thacker of Microsoft won the ACM’s 2009 Turing Award.
Charles P. (Chuck) Thacker is a pioneering architect, inventor, designer, and builder of many of today’s key personal computing and network technologies. During the 70s and early 80s at the Xerox Palo Alto Research Center, Chuck was a central systems designer and main pragmatic engineering force behind many of PARC’s technologies, including: Alto, the first modern personal computer with a bit-map screen to run graphical user interfaces with WYSIWYG fidelity and interaction. All of today’s personal computers with bit-map screens and graphical user interfaces descend directly from the Alto.
In addition, he invented the snooping cache coherence protocols used in nearly all small-scale shared-memory multiprocessors, pioneered the design of high-performance, high-availability packet- or cell-switched local area networks in the AN1 and AN2, and designed the Firefly, the first multiprocessor workstation. Almost 30 years after the Alto Chuck designed and built the prototype for the most used tablet PCs today.
(via The Register)