1943 was born in Pasadena, California on February 26th. He joined the Genie project while studying in the Physics Department of the University of California, Berkeley from 65438 to 0968. This project quickly developed into Berkeley Computer Company (BCC for short) and developed BCC 500 time-sharing system. Thacker led the design of central memory and microprocessor. But the company was not successful in business.
1970, he joined the Palo Alto Research Center of Xerox with many core technicians of BCC. Here, Thacker was the project leader of MAXC time-division operating system and the chief designer of Alto personal computing system. Preside over or participate in the design and development of Alto, Ethernet and laser printers. Among them, Alto designed by 1973 is the originator of modern personal computers. It is equipped with a mouse, a graphical user interface, and supports LAN networking. More surprisingly, it also has a wealth of software: mail client, WYSIWYG text editor, vector graphics editor, bitmap editor, WYSIWYG integrated circuit CAD system, Smalltalk development environment, Lisp development environment Interlisp, and even online multiplayer games. In contrast, the Apple computer that came out a few years later was completely dwarfed.
There is another anecdote about Alto that developers may be interested in: because its keyboard has no underline, programmers invented the CamelCase method to represent compound words with case changes. Of course, this is just a statement.
1983, Thacker came to DEC Company and participated in the establishment of the famous SRC (System Research Center). Here, he presided over the design of DEC Firefly, the first multiprocessor workstation, and the first Alpha architecture multiprocessor. snooping cache coherence protocol (also called Firefly protocol) was a by-product.
1997, he joined Microsoft and helped to establish Microsoft's research institute in Cambridge, England. Two years later, he returned to the United States and led the development of the prototype of Microsoft tablet computer. Now, he has returned to Microsoft Research Institute to study computer architecture.
In 2004, he was awarded the Charles Stark Draper Award by the American Academy of Engineering.
In 2007, he won the von Neumann Award of IEEE.
Win the Turing Prize
In 2009, the Turing Award was awarded to Charles Sack, the father of modern personal computers, in recognition of his pioneering design and implementation of the first modern personal computer, Xerox PARC· Aalto. There are also great inventions and contributions (the groundbreaking design and implementation of the first modern personal computer? Alto and groundbreaking inventions of Xerox PARC? And its contribution to local area network (including Ethernet), multiprocessor workstation, snoop cache consistency protocol and tablet PC.
Dame Wendy Hall, chairman of ACM, said that Charles Sack is one of the most outstanding engineers in the field of computer systems. One achievement after another has had a far-reaching impact on modern computer technology.
Zhujian An, vice president of Intel Research Center, said that Charles Thacker's Alto design has all the key elements of today's personal computers, laying the foundation for PC, the most creative and beneficial industry in the world.
Thacker's award has increased the number of computer architecture awards to six (excluding Brooks whose main contribution is the operating system). Judging from the award-winning disciplines, programming technology and theoretical computer science are still big families, with 12 times and 1 1 times respectively.
CSDN observation
Charles Thacker is a hard-core figure in technology, and his main achievements are computer hardware system architecture and network. From his life, I found it interesting that the products he presided over or participated in the design were basically not very successful in business, except for laser printers, which were not particularly prominent. Isn't it? The original BCC, Alto of Xerox, Firefly of DEC, and even Tablet PC of Microsoft did not become a blockbuster product.
This shows that the Turing Prize focuses on technological innovation rather than commercial success.
However, even if we look at Alto, which was designed nearly 40 years ago, we can't help but admire it. In fact, almost everything we have on the desktop computer today can be found on this machine.
Charles Sack is sober. In an interview in 2006, he said that although Alto has many cool functions, it also has many shortcomings. He mentioned Apple II, which was born ten years later, and praised its minimalist design and low cost. The cost of Alto is a big problem. In 1973, its price was 12000 dollars, equivalent to 65438+ million dollars today. This directly prevents it from entering the public desktop. Moreover, Alto is too advanced, and IBM PC and Apple computer have just started to enter the market when the microprocessors are powerful enough. He also mentioned that it is interesting that when Jobs and others decided to choose 6502 as the processor of Apple II, they didn't think 6502 was the CPU of Xerox's computer, but only used it as the keyboard controller of Alto's subsequent products. ......
In addition, the starting point of self-development also has a bad influence on the promotion of products. For example, although the idea of spreadsheet was put forward, developers didn't start developing it because they felt useless, and this kind of software became one of the main reasons why other PCs sold well in the early days.
Of course, from a longer period of time, commercial success may not be as meaningful as real technological innovation. When talking about his achievements, Charles Thacker said that although Alto is the most famous, what is perhaps more important today is the Firefly system he designed at DEC, and many of its experiences will contribute to the upcoming multi-core world.
When it comes to successful experiences, Thacker summed up two points: learning by doing and learning from other people's experiences. He mentioned that many people do it again now because the foundation of the algorithm is not good, and the result is not as good as the existing quality and safety, which ultimately hurts the end users.