Rest In Peace
To another of the giants who made our industry and whose shoulders we now stand on.
Computer Science has lost a titan: Charles P. “Chuck” Thacker died on Monday, June 12th, aged 74. As the Association for Computing Machinery's In Memoriam records, Thacker's early career saw him join Xerox's famed Palo Alto Research Center (PARC), where he worked on the Xerox Alto, the first personal computer to offer a …
... when we were debugging the tymeshare system, and then he showed up at D.C. Power to help with the TOPS-10 system that was being bastardized into WAITS. Later, I worked with him at DEC. Good guy, always thinking, not afraid to get his fingers dirty debugging and wirewrapping a backplane.
He'll be missed by his neighbors, not everybody can say that.
RIP, Chuck.
People say we will not see his like again but I think it says a lot at how hard it is to be truly innovative that we are still using many of the elements pioneered on the Alto, despite processors being 1000x faster and memory 64000x bigger than they were then.
Hardware hacking at a deep level has become a hell of a lot harder. People say look at FPGA's. Yes you can get a million gates on a chip but you won't get anywhere near x86 or AMD processor speeds in the GHz, not the 100s of MHz. There is no equivalent of the LS74181 ALU (that drove the Alto, PDP 11, and the Nova, and a bunch of other machines) at ECL clock speeds (although it's well within the techs clock and density range at less than 80 gates, and the design methods needs for such clock speeds are no longer in the realm of a "black art."
Nothing leverages the huge improvements we have seen in toolchains ability to re-host truly massive code bases, not just onto an upgraded version of a processor but onto a processor whose architecture did not even exist.
I'm not sure what the next step change will be but I expect that when it occurs there will be another Charles Thacker. In the meantime RIP.
In Australia there is a commercial running with one of the co-inventors of wi-fi. To paraphrase
fame is a fickle thing, who invented the red light, and saved so many lives. The mobile phone, or wi-fi.. Who are they? They change the world and yet no one knows their names.
Now another titan has passed and almost no one knows him. Sad testament of society today when everyone at least knows the kardashians (Don't care if I've spelt that wrong), but have no idea who some of these people are and how they changed the world..