Butler W. Lampson
Microsoft Research New England
1 Memorial Drive
Cambridge, MA 02142
Phone: 857-453-6310
Fax: 425-706-7329
Email: blampson@microsoft.com
This web page is at http://butler.lampsons.us as well as at http://research.microsoft.com/lampson
Here are a one-paragraph biography, a short biography and a CV (or as a single Word file here).
Here is a list of publications, with links to abstracts and text.
Here are brief descriptions of systems I have worked on. It is cross-referenced to the publications, and vice versa.
Here are links to the papers that people most often ask for:
Hints and Principles for Computer System Design. This is the 2019 paper.
Hints for Computer System Design. This is the 1983 paper.
Authentication in Distributed Systems: Theory and Practice.
Computer Security in the Real World.
Designing a Global Name Service.
How to Build a Highly Available System Using Consensus.
SDSI: A Simple Distributed Security Infrastructure.
Principles of Computer Systems course at MIT.
Practical Principles for Computer Security
Here are links to slides for recent talks I’ve given. They are to abstracts, from which you can get to the slides in HTML, Acrobat, or Word and PowerPoint formats.
Hints and Principles for Computer System Design
Resilient Cyber Security and Privacy
Perspectives on Security (SOSP 2015 history day talk)
Lazy and Speculative Execution
The Alto and Ethernet System: Xerox PARC in the 1970’s
Practical Principles for Computer Security
Gold and Fool’s Gold: Successes, Failures, and Futures in Computer Systems Research
Computer Systems Security—Lectures at TECS week, January 2005
Computer Security in the Real World
How Software Components Grew Up and Conquered the World
How to Build a Highly Available System Without a Toolkit
Understanding Network Connections
Principles for Computer System Design (my Turing lecture)
Formal Methods for Design: How To Understand Your System Before (Or After) You Build It
Here is the 2002 version of the tiretracks diagram that shows how computing research has spawned multi-billion dollar industries, in Acrobat or Word format. Here is the 2012 version (less detail, but more up to date) in Acrobat; this one was done by Peter Lee and his committee.
Here are some higher-resolution pictures: 
