Butler Lampson
Butler W. Lampson (born
1943) is a
computer scientist, considered to be one of the most significant in the history of the field.
Lampson received his
Bachelor's degree in Physics from
Harvard University in
1964, and his
Ph.D. in Electrical Engineering and Computer Science from the
University of California, Berkeley in
1967.
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
SDS 940's operating system.
Lampson was one of the founding members of
Xerox PARC in
1970, where he worked in the Computer Science Laboratory (CSL). His now-famous vision of a
personal computer was captured in the
1972 memo entitled "Why Alto?". In
1973, the
Xerox Alto, with its three-button
mouse and full-page-sized
monitor was born, and is now considered to be the first actual personal computer (in terms of how it was meant to be used).
All the subsequent computers built at Xerox PARC followed a general blueprint called "Wildflower", authored by Lampson, and this included the
D-Series Machines, the "Dolphin"
Xerox 1100, "Dandelion"
Xerox 1108, "Dandetiger"
Xerox 1109, "Dorado"
Xerox 1132, "Daybreak"
Xerox 6085, and "Dragon" (a 4-processor 6085 with one of the first snoopy caches, never released). The D-series machines were based on bit-slice AMD 2900 processors that ran up to 16 micro-tasks (one of which was an Ethernet controller), and these were some of the most affordable computers ever designed from TTL logic.
At PARC, Lampson helped work on many other revolutionary technologies, such as
laser printer design; two-phase commit protocols;
Bravo, the first
WYSIWYG text formatting program;
Ethernet, the first high-speed
local area network (LAN); and several influential programming languages.
By the early
1980s, Lampson left Xerox PARC for
Digital Equipment Corporation; he now works for
Microsoft Research. Lampson is also an
adjunct professor at
MIT.
In
1992, he won the distinguished
ACM Turing Award for his contributions to personal computing and
computer science.
Lampson's most famous aphorism is his statement "All problems in computer science can be solved by another level of indirection" (though Lampson himself apparently attributes this saying to
David Wheeler).
*
Alan Kay*
Charles Simonyi*
Lampson's website*
The milliLampson unit
