Computing Prize Winner Did Not Rest On His Laurels - Digits - WSJ

See the full article for more on Thacker’s long list of accomplishments

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.

Computing Prize Winner Did Not Rest On His Laurels - Digits - WSJ