Butler W. Lampson (born December 23, 1943) is an American computer scientist best known for his contributions to developing and implementing distributed personal computing. He has worked at Microsoft Research since 1995.
He was born in Washington, DC, in 1943, and later in life he received an AB from Harvard University, a PhD in EECS from the University of California at Berkeley, and honorary ScD’s from the Eidgenössische Technische Hochschule, Zuric,h and the University of Bologna. He holds multiple patents on networks, security, raster printing, and transaction processing. At Microsoft he has worked on anti-piracy, security, fault-tolerance, and user interfaces. He was one of the designers of Palladium and spent two years as an architect in the Tablet PC group. Currently, he works in Microsoft Research, working on security, privacy, and fault-tolerance, and kibitzing in systems, networking, and other areas.