Chuck Thacker				Butler Lampson

NASA Ames Main Auditorium (Building 201),
Moffett Federal Airfield, Mountain View, CA, USA

Reception to follow in
Museum's Visible Storage Exhibit Area (Building 126)

ABSTRACT OF TALK

Thirty years ago, the Xerox Palo Alto Research Center created, over a relatively short period, a paradigm shift in computing. Many of the technologies that make today's personal computers attractive, including high-quality graphical user interfaces, window systems, networked distributed computing, and laser printing, were mature technologies at PARC by the end of the '70s. The platform on which many of these technologies were developed was the Alto personal computer. Although small and slow by today's standards, the Alto's flexibility made it an ideal system for hardware and software experimentation. In this talk, Chuck Thacker and Butler Lampson describe a few of the applications and technologies the Alto enabled, as well as the exceptional working environment at PARC and the extraordinarily talented group of people who made it all happen.

BACKGROUND OF SPEAKER

Alto Designer Charles (Chuck) Thacker has spent almost 30 years in computing. Educated in physics at the University of California, Berkeley, he joined the university's Genie project in 1968. The project eventually became the Berkeley Computer Corporation, which developed the BCC 500 timesharing system. Thacker is a co-inventor of the Ethernet local area network, and contributed to many other projects, including the first laser printer and the Dorado, a high-performance ECL-technology personal workstation. He also designed and implemented the SIL CAD system.