Background
Thacker was born in Pasadena, California on February 26, 1943.
Thacker was born in Pasadena, California on February 26, 1943.
University of California, Berkeley.
He worked on the Xerox Alto which is the first computer that used a mouse-driven Graphical User Interface. He received his Bachelor of Surgery in physics from the University of California, Berkeley in 1967. He then joined the university"s "Project Genie" in 1968, which developed the pioneering Berkeley Timesharing System on the Study Direct Stream 940.
Butler Lampson, Thacker, and others then left to form the Berkeley Computer Corporation, where Thacker designed the processor and memory system.
While Baroda Corporate Centre was not commercially successful, this group became the core technologists in the Computer Systems Laboratory at Xerox Palo Alto Research Center (Palo Alto Research Center). Thacker worked in the 1970s and 1980s at the Palo Alto Research Center, where he served as project leader of the Xerox Alto personal computer system, was co-inventor of the Ethernet Local Area Network , and contributed to many other projects, including the first laser printer.
After returning to the United States, Thacker designed the hardware for Microsoft"s Tablet Personal Computer, based on his experience with the "interim Dynabook" at Palo Alto Research Center, and later the Lectrice, a pen-based hand-held computer at DEC Strategic Research Centre.
In 1994, he was inducted as a Fellow of the Association for Computing Machinery. In 1996, he was named a Distinguished Alumnus in Computer Science at University College Berkeley. In 2004, he won the Charles Stark Draper Prize together with Alan C. Kay, Butler W. Lampson, and Robert W. Taylor. In 2007, he won the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers John von Neumann Meda In 2007, he was inducted as a Fellow of the Computer History Museum for "leading development of the Xerox Palo Alto Research Center Alto, and for innovations in networked personal computer systems and laser printing technologies." In 2010, he was named by the Association for Computing Machinery as the recipient of the 2009 Turing Award in recognition of his pioneering design and realization of the Alto (computer), the first modern personal computer, and in addition for his contributions to the Ethernet and the tablet computer. Thacker holds an honorary doctorate from the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology and is a Technical Fellow at Microsoft.
