Charles P. Thacker Dies at 74; Helped Design Early Personal Computer

[monkeymagick]

I have sad news to share that we lost another one of the greats, Charles P. Thacker has passed. While most may not know the name, most can respect his early contributions to the personal computer. The New York Times has an article about his life and his contributions to the technological field. A recipient of the Turing Award in 2009, Mr. Thacker was project leader for the Xerox Alto, the first computer with a mouse-driven GUI, at PARC. Other notable list of achievements included co-inventor of Ethernet LAN and contributing to the first laser printer. I am grateful as a benefactor for all of his work towards the world of computing.

RIP, good sir.

"We used to say that Chuck threw the parts up in the air and they fell down Alto."

Mr. Thacker's foresight did not stop with computers. While at PARC, he helped invent Ethernet, a combination of hardware and software for linking computers. Like personal computers, Ethernet-based local-area networks have become ubiquitous.

Before his retirement from Microsoft, in February, Mr. Thacker was running a research laboratory, moving back and forth between the research and the product development sides of the company. He even did a stint working on Microsoft's Xbox 360 game console when a top engineer on the project became ill.

 

[Todd Walter]

It's amazing how far into the future he could imagine and then make real. A video worth watching is of one of his contemporaries, Doug Engelbert's 'Mother of all demos'. Think of how recently we've implemented some of these ideas and then look at the calendar!

http://web.stanford.edu/dept/SUL/library/extra4/sloan/mousesite/1968Demo.html