The Association of Computing Machinery (ACM) has awarded the highly coveted $250,000 Turing Award, which is considered the technology industry’s Nobel Prize, to the 67-year-old Microsoft researcher Charles P. Thacker this year.

Thacker has won the award for the pioneering work he carried out at Xerox’s highly-reputed Palo Alto Research Center (PARC) in the 1970s, when he contributed notably to the designing and construction of the first GUI computer as well as the Ethernet networking technology for connecting computer systems.

Noting that Thacker had received the award – funded by Google and Intel - for “his pioneering design and realization of the Alto, the first modern personal computer, and the prototype for networked personal computers,” the ACM elaborated that Thacker’s design “reflected a new vision of a self-sufficient, networked computer on every desk, equipped with innovations that are standard in today's models.”

Thacker, who left PARC to join the DEC, and later join Microsoft in 1997, admitted in an interview on Tuesday that he was “flabbergasted” at having received the Turing Award, which he said had mostly gone to “software people or theoreticians” in the past few years, and hardly ever to “people who have actually built some hardware.”

Thacker further added that he would probably donate the prize money to his alma mater, the University of California, Berkeley.