Wednesday, March 10, 2010:
The $250,000 Turing Award, one of technology's most prestigious prizes, was awarded yesterday to a Microsoft Corp researcher. The winner, Charles Thacker, worked at Xerox Corp's legendary Palo Alto Research Center, or PARC, in the 1970s. There he headed the hardware development for the firm, which developed radical new technologies that eventually led to the birth of the modern computer age, reports Yahoo! News.
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Thacker, 67, also co-invented the Ethernet networking technology for connecting computers, which is still in use today. Yesterday Thacker was recognised for his work in building what is generally considered the first modern personal computer. He said he'd probably donate the money to the University of California, Berkeley, where he studied.
"I was flabbergasted," he said in an interview on Tuesday. "I frankly never expected to get the award, because it wasn't given to people like me. Most of the people who have gotten the Turing award in the past few years are software people or theoreticians. There are scant few people who have actually built some hardware."
Some other recent winners of the award include Vint Cerf and Robert Kahn, and the man who invented the computer mouse-Doug Engelbart. The Turing Award is funded by Google and Intel Corp. It is named after the British mathematician Alan Turing and is administered by Association for Computing Machinery. In a statement, the association's president, Wendy Hall, said that Thacker is "one of the most distinguished computer systems engineers in the history of the field" and that his innovations have "profoundly affected the course of modern computing."
Ashish Joshi, EFYTIMES News Network
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