Xerox Alto Designer, Co-Inventor Of Ethernet, Dies at 74 (arstechnica.com) 96
An anonymous reader quotes Ars Technica:
Charles Thacker, one of the lead hardware designers on the Xerox Alto, the first modern personal computer, died of a brief illness on Monday. He was 74. The Alto, which was released in 1973 but was never a commercial success, was an incredibly influential machine... Thomas Haigh, a computer historian and professor at the University of Wisconsin, Milwaukee, wrote in an email to Ars, "Alto is the direct ancestor of today's personal computers. It provided the model: GUI, windows, high-resolution screen, Ethernet, mouse, etc. that the computer industry spent the next 15 years catching up to. Of course others like Alan Kay and Butler Lampson spent years evolving the software side of the platform, but without Thacker's creation of what was, by the standards of the early 1970s, an amazingly powerful personal hardware platform, none of that other work would have been possible."
In 1999 Thacker also designed the hardware for Microsoft's Tablet PC, "which was first conceived of by his PARC colleague Alan Kay during the early 1970s," according to the article. "I've found over my career that it's been very difficult to predict the future," Thacker said in a guest lecture in 2013. "People who tried to do it generally wind up being wrong."
In 1999 Thacker also designed the hardware for Microsoft's Tablet PC, "which was first conceived of by his PARC colleague Alan Kay during the early 1970s," according to the article. "I've found over my career that it's been very difficult to predict the future," Thacker said in a guest lecture in 2013. "People who tried to do it generally wind up being wrong."
Re: (Score:1)
I met him once. He was friends with the CEO of the company I worked for back around 2003-ish. Interesting man with lots of stories about PARC.
Re: (Score:2)
I'd rather eye fuck them. But respectfully. With cuddling.
Re: (Score:1)
at least he's not this fucking tool: https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2017/06/shivas-war-one-mans-quest-to-convince-the-world-that-he-invented-e-mail/
Re: (Score:2, Interesting)
No. Elon Musk isn't anything like Charles Thacker. Thacker was an inspired inventor, designer and engineer.
Musk just throws money behind generic ideas that have tons of prior art. This is much like Steve Jobs, Larry Ellison, Jeff Bezos and others of that ilk -- they are good at monetizing and marketing, but they are not very creative.
Re: (Score:1)
But they make products that people want to own and use. On the other hand, Thacker created shit that no one wanted but nerds furiously jack off their micropeens over.
Re: (Score:2)
Re: (Score:2)
That's why large companies buy them. Risk free innovation
Re: (Score:1)
Hey, 12-year-old. Get a sense of history and origin.
The windows and icons and on your smartphone and Ipad were conceived by Thacker and his PARC coworkers, while clicking on them was enabled by earlier inventors such as Ralph Benjamin and Douglas Engelbart.
Without these Jobs, Ellison, Bezos and Musk would have been selling something else, and you would be angering your parents by hogging the household phone chattering with other preteens.
Re: RIP. (Score:2)
Re: (Score:2)
Re: (Score:2)
Re: (Score:2)
More precisely, Musk gets government to heavily subsidize his companies, particularly SpaceX. That's very different from what people like Thacker used to do
RIP, Mr Thacker
Re: (Score:2)
Re: (Score:2)
Re: RIP. (Score:1)
Re: Sad, but... (Score:3, Informative)
The Ethernet AUI interface was DB15, and the other side of the transceiver was a vampire tape into coaxial cable. Ethernet over twisted pair came much later, and it was based on existing telephone cable and connectors.
Re: Sad, but... (Score:4, Insightful)
that first version could go up to 500 meters before repeater needed, tell me how far your twisted pair can go
Re: Sad, but... (Score:1)
that first version could go up to 500 meters before repeater needed, tell me how far your twisted pair can go
It can go up to 10Gbps.
Any other questions?
(PARC alumnus here)
Re: (Score:2)
oh yes instead of fiber it was more economical to use coaxial ethernet (and Arcnet) and repeaters for large building and campus/site runs back in the day.
ethernet (Score:2)
Re: (Score:2)
On the firmware side of things, I wish he had made the Ethernet Mac address 64 bits instead of 48.
Your opinion interests me. Could you go further? If I remember right, the numbering registry assigns a block of 24 bits (16M each) and very large manufacturers just buy more blocks as needed. I am sure that a lot of startups will buy a block and only sell a fraction (I was involved with one), but that does leave 16M blocks to sell. Wow, that's a lot. And I think it is likely that some rogue vendors steal blocks, just thinking the odds are miniscule that any customer will see an ARP conflict.
Maybe you are lo
Re: (Score:2)
You mentioned that very large manufacturers buy up variable length blocks. My idea here was having out of 64 bits, say 8 bits (to allow for 256 ethernet manufacturers worldwide) to have a constant block of addresses. Which they could assign according to their product lines. I don't know if 802.11 shares the same MAC addressing schemes as 802.3, but a company that made both Ethernet and WiFi parts could use different internal schemes to identify the parts. It would also have made autoconfiguration more
There's this amazing series of videos (Score:5, Informative)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?... [youtube.com]
I quite enjoy this.
Good man (Score:3)
Re: (Score:2)
you're funny AC, like anyone even gives a crap about YOU here while you're alive! hahahahaha
Predicting the Future is Easy (Score:2)
"I've found over my career that it's been very difficult to predict the future," Thacker said in a guest lecture in 2013. "People who tried to do it generally wind up being wrong."
Oh, come now. Predicting the future is easy. The future will be just like the present but different. See, easy-peasy.
Ethernet and Robert Metcalf (Score:5, Interesting)
Re: (Score:2)
Re: (Score:2)
co-inventor (Score:2)
Re: (Score:2)
Re: (Score:1)
Your post was bad and you should feel bad for making it.
Ethernet? (Score:2)
Ethernet was based on AlohaNet developed at the University of Hawaii. It was built to provide network communications to data centers across the islands. They used shortwave radios to send packets across the ether to each other. When I was an undergrad we actually studied AlohaNet in my OS class.
Maybe he refined it but he didn't invent it.
Re: (Score:2)
Ummm no. It was the mother of ethernet. And much of what we call WiFi protocols as well. Not everything is invented in Silly Valley. Start reading up on ALOHA and AlohaNet. The impact it had was huge.
um... (Score:2)
"It provided the model... that the computer industry spent the next 15 years catching up to."
And Xerox didn't sell it for those intervening 15 years because....?
Re: (Score:2)
Because it wasn't a copier and management was too risk averse to go into the business of selling computers.
It's really annoying that tiny (at the time obviously) startups like Apple and Microsoft did more with what would have been less than Xerox's coffee budget than Xerox did.
That sucks (Score:2)
Could we edit the title to at least include his name - credit where it is due.
I was confused... (Score:2)
Based on the summary, I initially thought this guys name was Xerox Alta.
I thought to myself, "that's such a badass name."