Biography
Charles Patrick "Chuck" Thacker (February 26, 1943 – June 12, 2017) was an American pioneer computer designer. [ 3 ] He designed the Xerox Alto , which is the first computer that used a mouse -driven graphical user interface (GUI). In 2009, he won the ACM Turing Award . Thacker was born in Pasadena, California , on February 26, 1943. [ 4 ] His father was Ralph Scott Thacker, born 1906, an electrical engineer ( Caltech class of 1928 [ 5 ] ) in the aeronautical industry. [ 6 ] [ 7 ] [ 8 ] [ 9 ] [ 10 ] His mother was the former (Mattie) Fern Cheek, born 1922 in Oklahoma , a cashier and secretary, who soon raised their two sons on her own. [ 11 ] He received his B.S. in physics [ 12 ] 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 SDS 940 . [ 13 ] Butler Lampson , Thacker, and others then left to form the Berkeley Computer Corporation, where Thacker designed the processor and memory system. While BCC was not commercially successful, this group became the core technologists in the Computer Systems Laboratory at Xerox Palo Alto Research Center ( PARC ). [ 4 ] Fields: Computer Science Education: University of California, Berkeley BS Award Citation: IEEE John von Neumann Medal (2007) Turing Award (2009) Computer History Museum Fellow (2007) [ 1 ] Eckert–Mauchly Award (2017) [ 2 ]
About the Turing Award
The ACM A.M. Turing Award is an annual prize given by the Association for Computing Machinery (ACM) for contributions of lasting and major technical importance to computer science. It is generally recognized as the highest distinction in computer science and is colloquially known as the "Nobel Prize of Computing."
Quick Facts
- Award: ACM A.M. Turing Award
- Added: 2026-02-07
- Source: Wikipedia
- Prize: $1,000,000 (USD)
- Presented by: ACM
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Notable Winners
- Donald Knuth (1974)
- Tim Berners-Lee (2016)
- Geoffrey Hinton (2018)
- Yoshua Bengio (2018)
- Yann LeCun (2018)