"The Charles Stark Draper Prize, a $500,000 annual award presented by the National Academy of Engineering, was given to Alan C. Kay, Butler W. Lampson, Robert W. Taylor and Charles P. Thacker for the technological achievement of their research," reports The Washington Times.
"At the beginning of the 1970s, the four engineers from the Xerox Palo Alto Research Center worked on the Alto personal computer, one of the first practical networked personal computers, which became operational in 1973. The desktop Alto had a three-button mouse, disk drives, and a graphic user interface that included menus and icons, making it the first model of the personal computers now used by millions around the world.
"Alto completely changed the computer culture, said Mr. Kay, one of the designers of the Alto software and currently senior fellow at Hewlett Packard Labs."
