Charles Thacker

Charles Patrick Thacker, known as Chuck Thacker (February 26, 1943 to June 12, 2017), was an American computer engineer who was the chief designer of the Xerox Alto at Xerox PARC in the early 1970s, the first computer built around a graphical user interface controlled by a mouse, and a co-inventor of the Ethernet local area networking standard. He received the 2009 ACM Turing Award, presented in 2010, for the pioneering design and realization of the Alto, and shared the 2004 Charles Stark Draper Prize with Alan Kay, Butler Lampson and Robert Taylor for the same work. After Xerox PARC he founded Digital Equipment Corporation's Systems Research Center in 1983, and in 1997 joined Microsoft Research, where he established its Cambridge, England laboratory and later helped design the hardware for Microsoft's Tablet PC.