A Microsoft Research technical fellow, Charles Thacker, was named the winner of the 2009 A.M. Turing Award for his work in designing the Alto, the first modern personal computer. The award comes with a cool $250,000, which Thacker will likely contribute to the University of California, Berkeley, where he earned a bachelor's degree in physics in 1967 and stumbled upon the field of computer engineering.

The Alto, developed at Xerox PARC (Palo Alto Research Center) in 1973, incorporated a bitmap display and a graphical user interface (GUI). Although never marketed commercially, the Alto nonetheless became an early computing staple in research labs, and its influence extends to modern PCs. Thacker was also honored for his work in developing the Ethernet, multiprocessor workstations, snooping cache coherence protocols, and tablet PCs.

"I never expected to win this one," Thacker is quoted as saying on the Microsoft Web site. "There are several other nice awards that I've won that I thought were within the realm of possibility, but this one I never even thought was possible."

In addition to being a founding member of Xerox PARC and DEC Systems Research Center, Thacker also helped found Microsoft Research Cambridge in 1997 and spent two years developing the lab's research agenda and operating principles. According to Microsoft, his current roles include "leading a computer-architecture group in Silicon Valley and working with academia to use field-programmable gate arrays to enable multicore-computing experimentation."

More information about the A.M. Turing Award, which is sponsored by Google and Intel, can be found here.