Butler W. Lampson (born December 23, 1943) is an American computer scientist best known for his contributions to the development and implementation of distributed personal computing. He won the 1992 ACM Turing Award.
Professional Developers Conference 2009 Technical Leaders Panel
During the 1960s, Lampson and others were part of Project GENIE at UC Berkeley. In 1965, several Project GENIE members, specifically Lampson and Peter Deutsch, developed the Berkeley Timesharing System for Scientific Data Systems' SDS 940 computer. After completing his doctorate, Lampson stayed on at UC Berkeley as an assistant professor (1967–1970) and associate professor (1970–1971) of computer science. For a period of time, he concurrently served as director of system development for the Berkeley Computer Corporation (1969–1971).
In 1971, Lampson became one of the founding members of Xerox PARC, where he worked in the Computer Science Laboratory (CSL) as a principal scientist (1971–1975) and senior research fellow (1975–1983). His now-famous vision of a personal computer was captured in the 1972 memo entitled "Why Alto?".[1] In 1973, the Xerox Alto, with its three-button mouse and full-page-sized monitor, was born.[2]
It is now considered to be the first actual personal computer in terms of what has become the "canonical" GUI mode of operation.
All the subsequent computers built at Xerox PARC except for the "Dolphin" (used in the Xerox 1100 LISP machine) and the "Dorado" (used in the Xerox 1132 LISP machine) followed a general blueprint called "Wildflower", written by Lampson, and this included the D-Series Machines: the "Dandelion" (used in the Xerox Star and Xerox 1108 LISP machine), "Dandetiger" (used in the Xerox 1109 LISP machine), "Daybreak" (Xerox 6085), and "Dicentra" (used internally to control various specialized hardware devices).
Following the acrimonious resignation of Xerox PARC CSL manager Bob Taylor in 1983, Lampson and Chuck Thacker followed Taylor colleague to Digital Equipment Corporation's Systems Research Center. There, he was a senior consulting engineer (1984–1986), corporate consulting engineer (1986–1993) and senior corporate consulting engineer (1993–1995). Shortly before Taylor's retirement, Lampson left to work for Microsoft Research as an architect (1995–1999), distinguished engineer (2000–2005) and technical fellow (2005–present).
In 2006, he was inducted as a Fellow of the Computer History Museum "for fundamental contributions to computer science, including networked personal workstations, operating systems, computer security and document publishing." Computer History Museum Fellow (2006).[7]
In 2006, he received the IFIP TC11 Kristian Beckman Award for information security.
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