MIT professor ‘made much of our world possible’
Butler Lampson, an adjunct professor at MIT since 1987 and a technical fellow at Microsoft Research, has as good a claim as anyone to the title of “father of the modern PC.” As one of the founders of Xerox’s Palo Alto Research Center (PARC), Lampson helped create the Alto, the first computer to feature a mouse and a graphical user interface (GUI) — the progenitor of both the Apple Macintosh and the Windows operating system. He also led the development of Bravo, the first “what you see is what you get” — or WYSIWYG — word processor, which ran on the Alto.Lampson turned 70 in December; last week, a group of computer science luminaries gathered at Microsoft Research New England, at the edge of the MIT campus, for a daylong conference celebrating his achievements. On hand were seven winners of the Turing Award, often called the Nobel Prize in computing....