Woodside computer pioneer wins prestigious engineering prize Woodside computer pioneer wins prestigious engineering prize (March 03, 2004)

By David Boyce

Almanac Staff Writer

One might wonder if Woodside resident Robert W. Taylor and his former colleagues at Xerox PARC are having posture problems with some 30 years worth of business executives, manufacturers and software programmers standing on their shoulders and exploiting their invention of the personal computer.

In recognition of their groundbreaking achievements in developing Alto -- the world's first personal computer -- at the Xerox Palo Alto Research Center in the early 1970s, the National Academy of Engineering on February 24 awarded the 2004 Charles Stark Draper prize to Mr. Taylor and three computer scientists he recruited to PARC: Alan Kay, Charles Thacker and Butler Lampson. The $500,000 prize money will be shared among the four men.

The Draper prize, considered a preeminent award, honors engineering achievements that help the public understand the importance of engineering and technology and that significantly impact society by improving quality of life and/or access to information.

Mr. Taylor, 71, founded the PARC computer science lab in 1970 and managed it until 1983. Of the many firsts accomplished there, the academy cited his team for developing computer features we take for granted today, including overlapping windows, the icon-based graphical user interface, the laser printer, the local area network and software that shows text on the screen as it will appear on the printed page.

Mr. Taylor came to Xerox PARC from the Defense Department's Advanced Research Projects Agency, where he was director of information processing techniques and initiated a project to build ARPAnet, the packet network that eventually became the Internet. He founded and managed a research center at Digital Equipment Corporation from 1983 until his retirement in 1996.

Mr. Taylor received the National Medal of Technology from President Clinton in 1999 "for visionary leadership in the development of modern computing technology, including the ARPAnet, the personal computer and the graphical user interface."

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