`Nobel of Computing' Goes to Early PC Designer

A researcher from Microsoft has won the $250,000 Turing Award for his work helping design and build what is widely considered the first modern personal computer.

While at Xerox Corp.'s famed Palo Alto Research Center, or PARC, in the 1970s, Charles Thacker led the hardware development for the Alto, which featured innovative display and other technologies that helped inspire future generations of computers. Thacker, 67, was also co-inventor of the Ethernet networking technology for connecting computers, which is still widely used.

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