Tablet PC Pioneer Wins Turing AwardTablet PC Pioneer Wins Turing Award

If a pioneer can be described as a person with arrows in the back, Charles P. Thacker may qualify, because his contributions to computing, although brilliant, often flopped initially. Many of his accomplishments, however, were later successful. And he's finally been recognized with the award this week of the $250,000 Turing prize.

The technical award is granted by the Association For Computing Machinery. Named after British mathematician and cryptologist Alan Turing, the prize is given annually "to an individual selected for contributions of a technical nature made to the computing community."

At different times in his career, Thacker, now 67, seemed to be everywhere. He was the lead hardware developer at the Xerox Corp.'s PARC Palo Alto Research Center where so much of the PC's early innovations were developed including the Alto computer's bit-mapped WYSIWYG test display, and the mouse pointing device. He was the co-founder of Ethernet, still computing's workhorse LAN.

Then he went to the Digital Equipment Corp. where he worked on DEC's Lectrice pen-based PC. After that, Thacker moved to Microsoft, where he led the team designing Microsoft's tablet PCs.

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But Thacker always seemed to be ahead of his time, producing early-stage innovations, only to watch his contributions be embodied in later successful products. The tablet PC that he developed for Microsoft is a case in point. It debuted in 2001 and logged sluggish sales, but many of its concepts have been taking off lately. Apple's iPad tablet, due to ship in a few days, may be the latest example.

Thacker has been collecting awards in recent years. He won the IEEE's John von Neumann award for "a central role in the creation of the personal computer and the development of networked computer systems." He is a technical fellow at Microsoft.

"I frankly never expected to get the (Turing) award," Thacker told the Associated Press this week, because it wasn't given to people like me. Most of the people who have gotten the Turing award in the past few years are software people or theoreticians. There are scant few people who have actually built some hardware."