Charles P. Thacker

Charles P. Thacker (born February 26, 1943, Pasadena, California, U.S.—died June 12, 2017, Palo Alto, California) was an American winner of the 2009 A.M. Turing Award, the highest honour in computer science, for his “pioneering design and realization of the first modern personal computer.”

Thacker received a bachelor’s degree in physics from the University of California, Berkeley, in 1967. He then worked at that university for Project Genie, one of the first time-sharing systems in which multiple people could work on the same computer. He and several of his collaborators on Project Genie joined the newly established Xerox Palo Alto Research Center (Xerox PARC) in Palo Alto, California, in 1970.

At Xerox PARC, Thacker led the project that developed the Alto, the first personal computer, in 1973. Alto used a bitmap display in which everything on the computer screen was, in effect, a picture and had a graphical user interface in which programs were shown in windows that could be manipulated by using a mouse. However, the mindset at Xerox, like that of many computer manufacturers of that time, was that a market did not exist for such machines. Corporate analysts asserted that Alto, which cost $12,000 to make, would be too expensive to market to the private and small-business users it was designed to serve. Therefore, the machine was never released. Thacker was also part of the team that invented the computer networking technology Ethernet, and he designed SIL, one of the first computer-aided design (CAD) programs.

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In 1983 Thacker joined Digital Equipment Corporation’s System Research Center in Palo Alto. There he led the team that developed Firefly, the first workstation that had more than one processor. In 1997 he joined Microsoft Corporation and established its first research lab in Cambridge, England. At Microsoft, he worked on the Tablet PC and did research into computer architecture.