The 2004 Draper Prize
Networking enabled use of computers for communication purposes, not simply as powerful calculators. Word processing capability also supported the transition of computers from academia to the business world, and, eventually, the home. The first practical networked computer, Alto, was designed with the intention of broadening the use of computers beyond researchers, so it offered basic word processing and e-mail. Alto was developed at Xerox’s Palo Alto Research Center (PARC), and it operated for the first time in April of 1973.
The 2004 Charles Stark Draper Prize was awarded “for the vision, conception, and development of the principles for, and their effective integration in, the world’s first practical networked personal computers,” according to the citation by the National Academy of Engineering (NAE). The members of the team recognized for their leadership in that development are Robert W. Taylor, Alan C. Kay, Butler W. Lampson, and Charles P. Thacker.
NAE President Wm. A. Wulf stated that “These four prize recipients were the indispensable core of an amazing group of engineering minds that redefined the nature and purpose of computing” through their work on the Alto computer. From their achievements stem the versatile, ubiquitous personal computers of today used in offices, schools, and homes around the world.
The Draper Prize Recipients
 |
Alan C. Kay a cofounder of Viewpoints Research Institute, Inc., Alan Kay is its president. He was a senior fellow at Hewlett Packard Labs through 2005. At PARC he led one of several groups that together developed modern workstations (and forerunners of the Macintosh), Smalltalk, the overlapping window interface, desktop publishing, the Ethernet, laser printing, and network “client-servers.”
|
 |
Butler Lampson is a Distinguished Engineer at Microsoft Corporation and an adjunct professor of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science. He was one of the designers of the SDS 940 time-sharing system, the Alto personal distribution computing system, the Xerox 9700 laser printer, the two-phase commit protocols, the Autonet LAN, and much more. He said that, even while working at PARC, he could see the future of the personal computer. “We wanted to make the computer an indispensable part of everything that people do with information,” said Lampson.
|
 |
Robert Taylor ran PARC’s Computer Science Laboratory during those critical days and says his team came to work with a shared dream, based on the idea that “the value of closely connecting people and their interests could dwarf the value of computing only for arithmetic.”
|
 |
Charles Thacker joined Microsoft Corporation in 1997 as director of advanced systems. Among his numerous distinctions, Thacker served as project leader of the MAXC timesharing system, and as the chief designer on the Alto computer. He is also the co-inventor of the Ethernet local area network. Asked to look toward the future, Thacker says he sees computers getting smaller and smaller – “more or less as they have in cars. My wife of 40 years, who doesn’t use computers at all, says ‘the best computer is an invisible computer.’ I suspect she’s right.”
|
|
