Charles P. Thacker

The Alto. Thacker designed the hardware of the Xerox Alto in 1973, a computer meant for one person with a bitmapped portrait screen, a mouse and a network connection, and he contributed to Ethernet alongside it. About two thousand were built for research rather than sale, but the Alto showed what a personal workstation could be. He later worked on the Tablet PC at Microsoft and received the Turing Award in 2009. He died in 2017.