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For fundamental contributions to computer science, including networked personal workstations, operating systems, computer security and document publishing.
"If our theories about the utility of cheap, powerful personal computers are correct, we should be able to demonstrate them convincingly on Alto." |
Butler Lampson
Butler Lampson is a Technical Fellow at Microsoft Corporation and an Adjunct Professor of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science at MIT.
Lampson's long career covers a remarkable range of topics, including computer architecture, local area networks, raster printers, page description languages, operating systems, programming languages and their semantics, fault-tolerant computing, transaction processing, computer security, and WYSIWYG editors. He is also widely admired as a technical leader.
Working with colleagues, he designed the Alto personal workstation, the Ethernet local area network, an encryption system for Ethernet, the Bravo text editor, the Interpress page description language, and dozens of groundbreaking computer architectures and systems including the SDS 940 timesharing system and the Xerox PARC 'Dorado' computer.
Lampson has taught at the University of California at Berkeley, and was a major contributor at the Computer Science Laboratory at Xerox PARC and at Digital Equipment Corporation's Systems Research Center.
He holds, individually or with others, 23 patents relating to networks, security, raster printing, and transaction processing.
He has received many honors, including the ACM's Software Systems Award for his work on the Alto, the IEEE Computer Pioneer Award and von Neumann Medal, the ACM Turing Award, and the NAE's Draper Prize.
Lampson holds an A.B. degree in Physics (Harvard, 1964) and a Ph.D. in Electrical Engineering and Computer Science (UC Berkeley, 1967).