Butler Lampson

Butler Lampson
Professional Developers Conference 2009 Technical Leaders Panel
Born	(1943-12-23) December 23, 1943 (age 73) Washington, D.C.
Fields	Computer science
Institutions	UC-Berkeley Xerox PARC DEC Microsoft MIT
Alma mater	Harvard University (A.B., 1964) University of California, Berkeley (Ph.D., 1967)
Thesis	Scheduling and Protection in an Interactive Multi-Processor System (1967)
Doctoral advisor	Harry Huskey
Known for	SDS 940, Xerox Alto
Notable awards	A. M. Turing Award (1992) IEEE John von Neumann Medal (2001) Draper Prize(2004) Computer History Museum Fellow (2006)
Website http://web.archive.org/web/20081202174014/http://research.microsoft.com/lampson/

Butler W. Lampson (born December 23, 1943) is an American computer scientist contributing to the development and implementation of distributed, personal computing. He is a Technical Fellow at Microsoft and an adjunct professor at MIT.

After graduating from the Lawrenceville School (where in 2009 he was awarded the Aldo Leopold Award, also known as the Lawrenceville Medal, Lawrenceville's highest award to alumni), 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 Berkeley Timesharing System for Scientific Data Systems' SDS 940 computer.

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. It is now considered to be the first actual personal computer (at least in terms of what has become the 'canonical' GUI mode of operation).