{"id":306278,"date":"2010-03-09T06:00:03","date_gmt":"2010-03-09T14:00:03","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.microsoft.com\/en-us\/research\/?p=306278"},"modified":"2016-10-16T13:59:21","modified_gmt":"2016-10-16T20:59:21","slug":"chuck-thacker-attains-computings-peak","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.microsoft.com\/en-us\/research\/blog\/chuck-thacker-attains-computings-peak\/","title":{"rendered":"Chuck Thacker Attains Computing\u2019s Peak"},"content":{"rendered":"

By Rob Knies, Managing Editor, Microsoft Research<\/em><\/p>\n

When Chuck Thacker graduated from the University of California, Berkeley, with a bachelor\u2019s degree in physics in 1967, he envisioned a career as an engineering physicist, designing particle accelerators.<\/p>\n

Things didn\u2019t progress according to plan.<\/p>\n

Thacker entered the workaday world to make money to pay for graduate school. Before long, he found himself hired as a staff engineer for a computer-research project based at his alma mater, and he soon found himself mesmerized by computing. As he jokes, \u201cI fell in with bad companions.\u201d<\/p>\n

Forty-two years later, Thacker, a technical fellow with Microsoft Research Silicon Valley, has ascended to the peak of his accidental profession, being honored March 9 as the 2009 winner of the Association for Computing Machinery\u2019s highest accolade, the A.M. Turing Award (opens in new tab)<\/span><\/a>, given for contributions of lasting and major technical importance to the computer field.<\/p>\n

The award, which is accompanied by a prize of $250,000, generally goes to computer scientists noted for conceptual or theoretical work. Thacker, 67, becomes just the second person to receive a Turing Award, widely regarded as the Nobel Prize of computing, for contributions in designing and building computer machinery, following Britain\u2019s Maurice Wilkes, the 1967 recipient.<\/p>\n

\u201cI was extremely surprised,\u201d Thacker said. \u201cI never expected to win this one. There are several other nice awards that I\u2019ve won that I thought were within the realm of possibility, but this one I never even thought was possible.\u201d<\/p>\n

Others were not quite as surprised, such as Butler Lampson (opens in new tab)<\/span><\/a>, a Microsoft Research New England (opens in new tab)<\/span><\/a> technical fellow and a Turing Award winner himself in 1992. Lampson, a longtime collaborator, nominated Thacker for the award.<\/p>\n

\u2018An Engineer\u2019s Engineer\u2019<\/h2>\n

\u201cChuck is surely one of the most distinguished computer-systems engineers in the history of the field,\u201d Lampson said in his nomination letter. \u201cChuck is an engineer\u2019s engineer. His skills span the full range, from analog-circuit and power-supply design through logic design, processor and network architecture, system software, languages, and applications as varied as CAD and electronic books, all the way to user-interface design.\u201d<\/p>\n

\"BEE3\"

Chuck Thacker works on BEE3, a system that uses field-programmable gate arrays to enable computer-architecture and other systems research.<\/p><\/div>\n

Thacker becomes the fourth computer scientist from Microsoft Research to have won the award, joining Lampson; Tony Hoare, who won in 1980; and the late Jim Gray (opens in new tab)<\/span><\/a>, who took the 1998 honor.<\/p>\n

Rick Rashid (opens in new tab)<\/span><\/a>, senior vice president of Microsoft Research, acknowledged the scope of Thacker\u2019s influence.<\/p>\n

\u201cMany people in the field of computing today owe the path of their careers to Chuck\u2014myself included,\u201d Rashid said.\u00a0\u201cAs a graduate student at the University of Rochester in New York, I began using a Xerox Alto and the Ethernet in 1975, and that led directly to the research in operating systems and distributed computing that has defined my life.\u201d<\/p>\n

Thacker\u2014son of an engineer, father of daughters Christine and Katherine, and for 46 years married to Karen, with whom he lives in Palo Alto, Calif.\u2014is best known for his pioneering work at Xerox PARC as the chief designer for the groundbreaking Alto, the predecessor of modern-day personal computers.<\/p>\n

But, as Lampson noted, Thacker\u2019s contributions range far and wide. He is co-inventor\u2014with Robert Metcalfe, David Boggs, and Lampson\u2014of the Ethernet and has achieved many other novel, successful networking explorations. His Firefly project for the Digital Equipment Corp. (DEC) in the mid-1980s produced the first multiprocessor workstation and remains relevant in today\u2019s multicore programming environment. He has had a long, productive interest in computer architecture. And his work in tablet computing led to the prototype of Microsoft\u2019s first Tablet PC.<\/p>\n

A Life Spent in Labs<\/h2>\n

Along the way, he became a founding member of three major research labs: Xerox PARC in 1971, DEC\u2019s Systems Research Center in 1984, and Microsoft Research Cambridge (opens in new tab)<\/span><\/a> in 1997.<\/p>\n

He never did, however, make it to graduate school.<\/p>\n

\u201cI had a very odd initial start of my career,\u201d Thacker said a few days before the Turing Award was announced, \u201cbecause I do not have a Ph.D.\u201d<\/p>\n

Having graduated from Berkeley and needing cash to continue his studies, he took a job with Jac Hawley, a Berkeley inventor. Thacker had worked with Hawley earlier at Berkeley Instruments, a company that made digital automated weather stations.<\/p>\n

\u201cI made him a deal,\u201d recalled Thacker, a former ham-radio operator. \u201cI said: \u2018Jack, I will take a year or so and work for you. You don\u2019t have to pay me too much, but you have to teach me how to use your machine shop, and in return for that, I will design your electronics for you.\u201d<\/p>\n

Hawley accepted that offer, and Thacker found himself in a builder\u2019s paradise. As he told Al Kossow for a Computer History Museum oral history (opens in new tab)<\/span><\/a> in 2007, \u201cHe had a good lathe and a good milling machine and a good drill and all the surrounding tools that you need to build mechanical stuff, so I learned how to use all that and became a fairly good machinist.\u201d<\/p>\n

A few months later, a friend of Hawley\u2019s dropped by the shop and told Thacker about an opening at Berkeley for the Project Genie computer-research effort. He got in touch and hired on, but not because he had any particular affinity for computing.<\/p>\n

\u201cI had used computers\u2014I had programmed them\u2014in the course of studying physics,\u201d Thacker said. \u201cI\u2019d always thought that was not very interesting, but when I actually got closely and deeply exposed to what was going on, I was seduced.\u201d<\/p>\n

High-Wattage Colleagues<\/h2>\n

During Project Genie, he also was introduced to seminal figures in computing history, people such as Lampson and Peter Deutsch, Mel Pirtle and Wayne Lichtenberger. They were interested in building a successor to the SDS 940, one of the first successful commercial time-sharing machines. But the effort was too big to gain funding as a university project, so the Berkeley contingent started shopping around.<\/p>\n

\u201cWe had to go to New York for venture capital,\u201d Thacker remembered. \u201cYou didn\u2019t go to Palo Alto then.\u201d<\/p>\n

\"career\"Funding secured, they founded the Berkeley Computer Corp. (BCC) and built a large, working time-sharing system, the BCC-500, in 1969. But the project lost momentum when investment-banking capital evaporated during the 1970 recession. The machine was sold to the U.S. Department of Defense\u2019s Advanced Research Projects Agency (ARPA), which installed it at the University of Hawaii, where it was used as the school\u2019s primary computer for several years.<\/p>\n

\u201cAt that time,\u201d Thacker said, \u201cit was possible to know almost everybody in computing, and the guy who knew everybody was Bob Taylor, head of the ARPA Information Processing Techniques Office. Bob had just been hired by George Pake, who was setting up the Xerox Palo Alto Research Center (PARC).\u201d<\/p>\n

Taylor and Pake knew of BCC and came to Berkeley to interview the staff.<\/p>\n

\u201cThey hired some of us,\u201d Thacker said, \u201cand that\u2019s the way the PARC Computer Science Laboratory got started.\u201d<\/p>\n

The facility, which opened in 1970, became legendary for its computing innovations, and in early 1971, Thacker became one of its first hires. The research pursued by Xerox PARC bore fruit that shaped the future of computing: the Ethernet, laser printing, and, of course, the Alto.<\/p>\n

\u201cWe were lucky,\u201d Thacker told Kossow, \u201cbecause we could work on new things \u2026 because we needed them. The motivation of being able to build things that you actually want is extremely high.\u201d<\/p>\n

The Alto pioneered the use of a bitmapped display that, in conjunction with a mouse, offered a graphical user interface that remains in use today on more than a billion computers around the world. The UI also enabled WYSIWYG\u2014\u201cwhat you see is what you get\u201d\u2014word processing, and the Alto was designed to be self-sufficient, with storage and computing achieved locally. In addition, Gary Starkweather, with help from Thacker and others, developed the laser printer, which was too expensive to give to everyone at the lab, necessitating a need for networking that resulted in the development of the Ethernet.<\/p>\n

\u201cIt was very intense,\u201d Thacker recalled. \u201cWe previously had built a time-sharing system we wanted to have for the computer-science lab at PARC, a machine more like the machine that the rest of the ARPANET community used, a PDP-10. Unfortunately, Xerox had just bought a computer company [Scientific Data Systems], and they wanted us to use an SDS Sigma V. We looked at the machine, and it was just not good for time sharing. We wanted to buy a PDP-10, but it would have been very unseemly had we placed an order with the company\u2019s primary computer competitor, so we decided to build one.\u201d<\/p>\n

That they did, over the next 18 months, and the result was MAXC, the Multiple Access Xerox Computer.<\/p>\n

Building the Alto<\/h2>\n

\u201cWhen we got done with the MAXC system,\u201d Thacker said, \u201cwe were looking around for things to do, and Bob Taylor had been trying to convince us to build a personal machine, but he couldn\u2019t quite explain it to the point where we understood what he was talking about. But then a couple of things happened. No. 1, I figured out a way to make a very inexpensive machine, by the standards of even minicomputers of the day. The other thing was that we figured out the bitmap display.<\/p>\n

\u201cThat came about because of the introduction of semiconductor memory. MAXC had used the very first available semiconductor memory. We had these nice little boards and this very inexpensive memory\u2014it cost less than a tenth of a cent a bit. That meant you could afford to use the memory as backing for the display.\u201d<\/p>\n

The cost engineering was, indeed, one of the design choices Thacker made that helped to make the PC a practical reality.<\/p>\n

\u201cThe normal way a computer works,\u201d he said, \u201cis there are a central processor and the memory, and then there\u2019s input\/output, and the input\/output controllers always run the costs way up. It\u2019s your graphics card and your Ethernet controller and all that. So I said, \u2018Let\u2019s time-share the processor at the lowest level.\u2019 This is what people now would call multithreading. That made the cost much lower, so we could afford to build one of these things for every lab member. That worked out extremely well.\u201d<\/p>\n

And networking was soon to follow.<\/p>\n

\u201cThe Ethernet didn\u2019t come in immediately,\u201d Thacker said. \u201cIt lagged by about six months. The signaling part of the Ethernet I figured out; that was the realm of electrical engineering. But all the other stuff, the packet format and the protocols and so on, that was Metcalfe and Boggs and, to some extent, Butler.\u201d<\/p>\n

The Alto was never released commercially, but it was deployed extensively within Xerox and found its way into a number of universities\u2014and into Jimmy Carter\u2019s White House. Its influence has been pervasive; concepts first revealed in the Alto are used daily on hundreds of millions of computers worldwide.<\/p>\n

\u201cIt\u2019s very gratifying,\u201d Thacker smiled. \u201cWhen people say, \u2018What have you done for Microsoft lately?\u2019 I say: \u2018You don\u2019t understand. The most impact I\u2019ve had on Microsoft was work that was done before Microsoft even existed, when Bill [Gates] was in short pants.\u2019<\/p>\n

\u201cPCs didn\u2019t get to be as good as the Alto for about 12 years. It took a lot of work on software and a lot of hardware progress before they got on a par with scientific workstations. But they had one major advantage, and that was that Moore\u2019s Law was on their side.\u201d<\/p>\n

From PARC to DEC to Microsoft<\/h2>\n

In 1983, after 13 years at Xerox PARC, Taylor left after a disagreement with management, taking several of his key personnel, including Thacker, with him. They found a new home at DEC, founding the Systems Research Center.<\/p>\n

\u201cCuriously enough,\u201d Thacker said, \u201cI stayed there for 13 years, too.\u201d<\/p>\n

While at DEC, he helped construct the first computer to use the DEC Alpha system, a machine credited with advancing Alpha\u2019s emergence onto the market by at least a year.<\/p>\n

\u201cThat was worth a lot of money,\u201d Thacker said. \u201cNobody ever made money on the Alto, but that made a lot of money.\u201d<\/p>\n

He also led hardware development on Firefly, which enabled years of system and applications research both within DEC and in academia. And he pursued networking development of the AN1 and AN2 systems and a high-performance, high-bandwidth networking project that became a product called GIGAswitch\/ATM.<\/p>\n

But in the mid-\u201880s and early \u201890s, Thacker also found himself in discussions with Microsoft. He had preliminary talks with company personnel\u2014including, on various occasions, Gates, Lampson, Gray, and Rashid\u2014in 1983 and again in 1991. But Thacker thought of himself as a hardware guy and didn\u2019t see an appropriate fit at Microsoft.<\/p>\n

But in 1997, he noted, \u201cThey finally found the right button.<\/p>\n

\u201cI was preparing to leave DEC,\u201d he explained. \u201cOur kids were grown and gone by that time, and my wife and I figured that we would take a year and do a sabbatical, either at the Computer Laboratory at Cambridge or at ETH in Zurich. I knew a lot of people at both places.\u201d<\/p>\n

Thacker was pitching the idea of a Microsoft Research lab in Silicon Valley at the same time that his colleague, the late Roger Needham, was lobbying for a Microsoft Research facility in Cambridge, U.K. The latter won out.<\/p>\n

\u201cI sent Roger an e-mail and said, \u2018Congratulations, I\u2019m glad to hear your lab was a success,\u2019 \u201d Thacker remembered. \u201cRoger was an extremely cryptic guy, and he sent me back mail in a few minutes that said, \u2018Well, yes, it does seem to have happened, and you\u2019ll hear more about this shortly.\u2019<\/p>\n

\u201cThirty minutes later, the phone rang, and it was Nathan Myhrvold [founder of Microsoft Research and then Microsoft\u2019s chief technology officer]. He said, \u2018Chuck, how would you like to come to Microsoft and take a two-year appointment to help Roger set up the lab in Cambridge?\u2019<\/p>\n

\u201cI said, \u2018Well, let me talk to my wife,\u2019 so I called her up and said, \u2018How would you like to go off for two years and help to set up a Microsoft lab in Cambridge?\u2019 She said: \u2018No! I hate Boston. It\u2019s too cold!\u2019 I said, \u2018No, love, the other one,\u2019 and she said, \u2018Oh! OK!\u2019<\/p>\n

\u201cThat\u2019s how I ended up coming to Microsoft.\u201d<\/p>\n

The Tablet<\/h2>\n

Thacker spent his two-year England assignment recruiting, defining the lab\u2019s research agenda, handling publicity, and establishing operational principles. Once Microsoft Research Cambridge was on a sound footing, the Thackers began planning a return to the States.<\/p>\n

Karen Thacker was wary of Redmond, concerned with the region\u2019s potential to afflict seasonal affective disorder, so her husband called Rashid and said: \u201cWell, Rick, I\u2019m not moving to Redmond. Am I still working for you?\u201d Assured that remained the case, Thacker returned to the Bay Area and got involved in a nascent electronic-book effort. He\u2019d worked on such projects in the past and convinced the Microsoft team he could build a reader.<\/p>\n

Thacker took charge of a group of Peninsula-based contractors, provided the initial design for the Tablet PC, and worked with Flextronics to get it manufactured. While the Tablet PC has never achieved wild popularity, it has gained steadily in market share ever since its debut in 2001.<\/p>\n

\u201cSome people at that time really loved Tablets, and some still do,\u201d Thacker observed. \u201cFedEx delivery people use them. We\u2019re beginning to take over medicine, because doctors want to write; they don\u2019t want to type. And university professors love<\/em> Tablets\u2014for one reason: When they\u2019re giving a class, they can write on their slides as they\u2019re teaching.<\/p>\n

\u201cI\u2019m proud of the Tablet PC,\u201d he told Kossow in 2007, \u201cbecause I think, eventually, it will take over, and all PCs will be Tablet-like.\u201d<\/p>\n

Thacker is in his 13th year at Microsoft, but don\u2019t expect his 13-year itch to strike again. He remains engaged and active in his work, leading a computer-architecture group in Silicon Valley and working with academia to use field-programmable gate arrays to enable multicore-computing experimentation. He\u2019s also quite intrigued by a project called Barrelfish, a partnership between Microsoft Research Cambridge and ETH Zurich that will enable research on operating-system principles specifically for multicore systems.<\/p>\n

New Approaches<\/h2>\n

Such efforts have Thacker reconsidering the way computing is done.<\/p>\n

\u201cWe have made an awful lot of progress over the last 50 years,\u201d he said, \u201cbut it\u2019s the 21st century, and the technologies we have at our disposal are very different from the kinds of technologies we had when those original decisions were made. It seems prudent for us to go back and look at some of those things in light of what we have in the 21st century. You might wind up doing computing in a very different way.\u201d<\/p>\n

For Thacker, it\u2019s been quite an adventure, from dreams of particle accelerators to becoming a recipient of computing\u2019s greatest honor. Along the way, he\u2019s enjoyed the camaraderie and counsel of friends such as Lampson, Taylor, Alan Kay, Roy Levin, and Mike Schroeder. But Thacker\u2019s focus remains steady: making computing even better:<\/p>\n

\u201cMy wife says: \u2018The computers that I like are the invisible computers. I know my car has 200 computers in it. I don\u2019t see them. I don\u2019t have to interact with them. The way I see you interacting with computers is dumb.\u2019 And she\u2019s right! We have a tremendous number of things to do.\u201d<\/p>\n

What about the things Thacker has accomplished thus far? How does he measure his impact?<\/p>\n

\u201cPersonal computing,\u201d he concluded, \u201cbasically grew out of what happened at Xerox PARC\u2014and I had a big part in that. That\u2019s probably enough.\u201d<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

By Rob Knies, Managing Editor, Microsoft Research When Chuck Thacker graduated from the University of California, Berkeley, with a bachelor\u2019s degree in physics in 1967, he envisioned a career as an engineering physicist, designing particle accelerators. Things didn\u2019t progress according to plan. Thacker entered the workaday world to make money to pay for graduate school. […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":39507,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"msr-url-field":"","msr-podcast-episode":"","msrModifiedDate":"","msrModifiedDateEnabled":false,"ep_exclude_from_search":false,"_classifai_error":"","footnotes":""},"categories":[194470,194476,194463],"tags":[194534,214616,195119,214610,214613,214637,186832,201513,214628,214631,203155,214625,214619,214640,214622,214634,204681,204685],"research-area":[13552,13547],"msr-region":[],"msr-event-type":[],"msr-locale":[268875],"msr-post-option":[],"msr-impact-theme":[],"msr-promo-type":[],"msr-podcast-series":[],"class_list":["post-306278","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-computer-architecture","category-devices-and-hardware","category-systems","tag-a-m-turing-award","tag-analog-circuit","tag-computer-architecture","tag-computer-machinery","tag-computer-systems-engineer","tag-decs-systems-research-center","tag-distributed-computing","tag-ethernet","tag-firefly","tag-multiprocessor-workstation","tag-operating-systems","tag-personal-computers","tag-power-supply","tag-project-genie-computer-research","tag-system-software","tag-tablet-computing","tag-xerox-alto","tag-xerox-parc","msr-research-area-hardware-devices","msr-research-area-systems-and-networking","msr-locale-en_us"],"msr_event_details":{"start":"","end":"","location":""},"podcast_url":"","podcast_episode":"","msr_research_lab":[199563,199561],"msr_impact_theme":[],"related-publications":[],"related-downloads":[],"related-videos":[],"related-academic-programs":[],"related-groups":[],"related-projects":[],"related-events":[],"related-researchers":[],"msr_type":"Post","byline":"","formattedDate":"March 9, 2010","formattedExcerpt":"By Rob Knies, Managing Editor, Microsoft Research When Chuck Thacker graduated from the University of California, Berkeley, with a bachelor\u2019s degree in physics in 1967, he envisioned a career as an engineering physicist, designing particle accelerators. 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