Thirty-five years ago, the technology industry began a slow but dramatic shift that ultimately would lead to the creation of the modern computer industry. In June, Microsoft researcher Chuck Thacker won the prestigious John von Neumann Medal, bestowed by the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers, for his role in that transition.
In an era in which CV inflation seems the rule rather than the exception, Thacker's achievements still command special attention. During the course of his work at Xerox's Palo Alto Research Center (Parc), he helped pioneer two of the biggest advances: the PC and network connectivity.
Thacker was the chief designer of the Alto, the first personal computer to use a bitmapped display and mouse. Along with Bob Metcalfe, he also was the co-inventor of the Ethernet local area network. More recently, Thacker had a major hand in the design of Microsoft's Tablet PC.
Q: You went to [the University of California at] Berkeley, where you studied physics. Did you start off thinking that would lead to a career as a physicist?
A: Actually, I had a very definite plan. I wanted to design particle accelerators. I wanted to be not a theoretical physicist but an experimental physicist and I had worked with that before. I worked at the Caltech Synchrotron Laboratory, as a matter of fact. So I was very definitely preparing myself for a career doing that. We did understand Moore's Law. We realised most of the implications and that was why we did something which was very daring for the time — which was the bitmap display.
Can you step me through how that led to your involvement with Project Genie?
My wife and I were quite happily married, living in Berkeley, and I decided to take a year off between undergraduate and graduate school and I went to work for a friend who was in Berkeley at that time. He was a guy named Jack Holly, who used to run a company called Berkeley Instruments. I said: "OK, Jack, I'll tell you what I'll do. I'll work for you for a year and I will design electronics for you because you're not good at it and you can teach me to run all your machine tools because I'm not good at that. Pay me something, but you don't have to pay me a whole lot of money."
We did understand Moore's Law. We realised most of the implications and that was why we did something which was very daring for the time — which was the bitmap display
Chuck Thacker, Microsoft
About nine months later, a friend of his dropped by one day who was a representative for an electronics component company. He mentioned that the Genie Project was looking for a staff engineer and I said: "What's that?" He said: "Well, it's a pretty interesting computer project." So I went up and talked to them and we hit it off and I went to work for them — and, as a result, I never went to graduate school.
That's a great story. While you were there, you also had a chance to know JCR Licklider.
Yeah. I never really worked with Lick, who by then was retired, but he visited our lab many times and I got to know him.
When you left to go to Xerox Parc, you went with Butler Lampson and Peter Deutsch, who worked with you on the Genie Project, and you guys became the core of the research team over there?
Correct.
You spent about 12, 13 years at Parc. Nowadays the story of what went on there is referred to in almost reverential terms. What was the more gritty reality on the ground? When you arrived, how was it organised? Was it organised, was it a free-for-all or was it somewhere in between?
Well, I was approximately employee number one. It was very interesting because there was basically nothing. It was Bob Taylor and me in an empty building. So we figured out what we were going to do. I was mainly interested in the infrastructure aspect, not the computer science part. At that time I thought of myself very much as an engineer.
So we realised that we needed a time-sharing machine and the one we wanted to get was a PDP-10 [programmed data processor, model 10], made by Digital Equipment [Corporation (DEC)]. Unfortunately, Xerox had just paid…
