By JORDAN ROBERTSON - AP Technology Writer - Associated Press
Tuesday, March 9, 2010
A Microsoft researcher has won the $250,000 Turing Award, one of technology's most coveted prizes, 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.
The Turing Award is funded by Google Inc. and Intel Corp. It is named for the mathematician Alan Turing.