Communications - July 2010

Milestones;|;DOI: 10.1145/1785414.1785424
Gary;Anthes
committed to success
Charles P. Thacker talks about the importance of simplicity,
reusable tools, thinking broadly, and his practice of Tom Sawyering.

IN oUr aGe of hyperspecializa- tion, it’s often said that no one can be a Renaissance man. In- deed, Charles P. Thacker, win- ner of the 2009 ACM A.M. Tur-
ing Award, insists he isn’t one. But, he
notes, “I can lurk at a lot of different
levels. I have designed chips, I can de-
sign logic, I can design systems, and I
can write software up to and including
user interfaces.”
While “lurking” in these distinct
areas for four decades, Thacker has
led the design of an astonishing array
of technologies, from personal com-
puters to networking technology to
tablet PCs. (An interview with Thack-
er, “From Single Core to Multicore,”
appears on p. 112.) Today, he is best
known for his invention of the Alto, a
personal computer, at Xerox Palo Alto
Research Center (PARC) in 1970.

“The Alto was the world’s first personal computer,” says David Patterson, a professor of computer science at the University of California, Berkeley and a computer hardware pioneer himself. “It included everything we think of as being in a PC today: a high-quality graphical user interface, networked computing, laser printing, and the mouse. It, in turn, enabled the invention of software at PARC that shapes our world today: window systems, WYSIWYG editing, drawing and painting, email clients, graphical CAD tools, and clients for file and print servers.

Pho ToGRAPh by RIChARD MoRGens TeIn

“For those who were not around
at the time, it’s hard to put into per-
spective what a breakthrough this
was and how much it shaped the
computer industry,” Patterson adds.
“The notion that you would build a
powerful computer for just one per-
son was a radical one.”
Thacker also co-designed Ethernet
local area network technology at PARC
in the 1970s and the Firefly multipro-

charles thacker with the circuit board of his latest project—the Bee3 computer-architecture hardware platform.

“complexity is
the enemy of
computer science,
and it behooves us,
as designers,
to minimize it.”

cessor workstation and fault-tolerant networks at Digital Equipment Corporation in the 1980s. “These things have a common thread,” Thacker says, “which is they are part of a distributed system—they don’t stand in isolation.” The Alto was a “nice” single-user machine, he says, but its “real power” was unleashed by networking.

Thacker cites several secrets for his decades of continual success: strive for simplicity, build a kit of reusable tools, insist on sound specifications, think broadly, and make sure your collaborators also succeed.

Of simplicity, he says, “A lot of peo-
ple think mastering complexity is the
goal. But once you have gotten your
Master of Complexity merit badge, you
don’t have to keep winning it. Com-
plexity is the enemy of computer sci-
ence, and it behooves us, as designers,
to minimize it.”
Thacker is accomplishing exactly
that in his role as a Technical Fellow
at Microsoft Research. He’s designing
simple multicore computers, using
single field-programmable gate arrays.
The computers are used to conduct re-
search in multicore systems, and are
much faster than simulators written in
software and much cheaper than build-
ing real multicore chips, he says. Their
simplicity makes it easy for Microsoft
and university researchers to evaluate
different system designs and methods
of programming systems with multiple
processor cores.