Butler Lampson
Butler Lampson Wright ( born December 23, 1943 in Washington, DC ) is an American computer scientist who was involved in numerous significant developments, most notably that of the personal computer.
Life
Lampson made 1964 his bachelor's degree in physics at Harvard University, in 1967 with the work scheduling and Protection in Interactive Multi-Processor System on his Ph.D. in electrical engineering and computer science at the University of California, Berkeley with Harry Huskey. After that, he was an associate professor of computer science there.
In the 1960s, Lampson was involved in the Berkeley Project Genie, where he in 1965 with Peter L. German and other wrote the operating system for the SDS -940 mainframe.
1970 Lampson was one of the founding members of Xerox PARC, where he worked in the Computer Science Laboratory (CSL ). His vision of a personal computer he summarized in 1972 in the memo Why Alto? . In 1973, he developed this idea by Charles P. Thacker and other Xerox Alto with its three-button mouse and the screen in the format of a DIN A4 page - the first computer with a graphical user interface. All other built at Xerox PARC computer followed an architectural concept Lampson called Wildflower.
Lampson was involved in PARC also to the development of several other revolutionary technologies such as the laser printer, the first WYSIWYG word processing Bravo ( with Charles Simonyi ), Ethernet ( with Robert Metcalfe and Charles P. Thacker ), commit protocols, and various influential programming languages (like Mesa ). On his name run over 30 patents.
In 1984 Lampson Xerox PARC for Digital Equipment Corporation, 1995 Microsoft Research, where he conducted research on Tablet PC systems among others. Since 1987, he is also an associate professor at MIT.
Lampson is married and has two children.