Microsoft boffin wins geek gong

Microsoft engineer Charles 'Chuck' Thacker has been given this year's Turing Award - the techie equivalent of a Nobel Prize. The award, which is named in honour of computing pioneer and wartime code-breaker Alan Turing, was given in recognition of Thacker's work on what some consider to be the first modern personal computer - the Alto at Xerox PARC - as well as ground-breaking contributions to the invention of Ethernet, multiprocessor workstations, snooping cache...