The influential American engineer Charles P. Thacker died on June 19, aged 74.
Thacker designed the Alto personal computer at Xerox PARC in the 1970s which influenced development of the Mac after Steve Jobs saw it during a visit to PARC.
He also contributed to the development of Ethernet, Tablet PCs, and laser printers.
The computer scientist Butler Lampson, one of Thacker’s colleagues at Xerox PARC and later at Microsoft has spoken about his ability to see what was important and his breadth of coverage:
He could do everything from circuit design all the way through hardware architecture and programming and user-interface design.
The Association for Computing Machinery and IEEE Computer Society recently honoured Charles P. Thacker with the Eckert-Mauchly Award.
Leave a Reply