Computing Industry Bestows Rare Honor upon Hoare, Lampson

Published October 17, 2006

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By Rob Knies, Managing Editor, Microsoft Research

One has spent his professional career exploring programming language theory. The other has made fundamental contributions to PC networks, operating systems, security, and document publishing.

One works in Cambridge, U.K. The other works in Cambridge, Mass.

But Tony Hoare and Butler Lampson have a couple of things in common: Both work for Microsoft Research, and both were named fellows of the Computer History Museum during an awards dinner and ceremony Oct. 17 in Mountain View, Calif.

The evening included many of the leading lights of the technology world, gathered “to honor and celebrate the people and innovations that paved the way for their own advancements and position in the history.”

Hoare and Lampson join Robert Kahn, networking pioneer, and Marvin Minsky, co-founder of the field of artificial intelligence, as members of the museum’s Hall of Fellows, class of 2006.

All four have something rare indeed: an A.M. Turing Award. Each has captured that honor, bestowed by the Association for Computing Machinery (ACM) and considered computer science’s most prestigious accolade. Minsky won the Turing in 1969, Hoare in 1980, Lampson in 1992, and Kahn in 2004.

For the Microsoft Research honorees, the Fellow Award represents a special achievement.

Butler Lampson “It’s a pleasure,” said Lampson, a Microsoft technical fellow, “to join the distinguished company of Computer History Museum fellows, which includes many of the great names in computer science and engineering.”

Hoare, who said he was “surprised and happy, especially since Butler joins me in the honor,” echoed Lampson’s delight.

“It means,” said Hoare, a principal researcher in the Programming Principles and Tools group at Microsoft Research’s U.K.-based Cambridge lab, “that the importance of early ideas and discoveries in software is recognized in a museum which has a truly outstanding collection of hardware.”

The class of 2006 increases the roster of Computer History Museum fellows to 40, including another member of Microsoft Research, Gordon Bell, a San Francisco-based principal researcher for Microsoft Research Silicon Valley. Bell, named a museum fellow in 2003, is a founding board member of the museum.

Hoare was humble in explaining his selection for the honor.

“I have been around for a long time,” he said. “I started when so many things were new. It was not so difficult to make a recognized contribution as it is today.”

The museum’s Web site was not bound by such modesty, citing Hoare’s “development of the Quicksort algorithm and lifetime contributions to the theory of programming languages.”

“Throughout much of the 1960s and ‘70s,” states the museum’s biography of Hoare, “a central concern among computer scientists was a ‘software crisis’ caused by the increasing complexity of computer software and systems. This inspired Hoare, who moved [from Queen’s University in Belfast, Northern Ireland] to the University of Oxford in 1977, to devise a system of logical rules (now known as ‘Hoare Logic’) that any programmer could follow, in the process helping to move the writing of software from a somewhat mystical discipline into a field with solid foundations.”

Hoare, who devised Quicksort in 1959 while studying machine translation of languages in Moscow, also was integral in creating the Z specification language and the CSP concurrent programming model. More recently, he has been working with long-term research colleague He Jifeng on unifying theories of programming.

The author of hundreds of papers over the years, he was knighted by Queen Elizabeth II in 2000. That’s right—officially, he is known as Sir Tony Hoare. But expect no pretension from this pioneer; asked about his proudest achievement, he recalls enlightening others:

“In my 22 years as professor at Oxford University, I recruited excellent research colleagues and started the teaching of computing at undergraduate and graduate levels and also a professional in-service degree course.”

Lampson, in addition to his role with Microsoft Research, is an adjunct professor of electrical engineering and computer science at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. He cites his work on the Alto system, a prototype for modern networked PCs with their graphical user interfaces that was developed at the Xerox Palo Alto Research Center, as both the reason why has was named a Computer History Museum fellow and as the proudest accomplishment in a long, extraordinary career.

The museum Web site notes that Lampson’s 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,” the site understates, “also widely admired as a technical leader.”

In addition to his latest honor, Lampson has won the ACM Software Systems Award, the Computer Pioneer Award and the von Neumann Medal from the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers, as well as the National Academy of Engineering’s Draper Prize.

But, as he mentioned, his work on the Alto is explicitly called out on the museum Web site, in addition to his work on the Ethernet local area network, an Ethernet encryption system, the Bravo text editor, the Interpress page description language, and “dozens of groundbreaking computer architectures and systems.”

The Computer History Museum is the world’s largest, most highly regarded repository for preserving and presenting the computing revolution and its impact. Microsoft is one of three Fellows Sponsors for the Fellow Awards.

Included among the biographical information the museum Web site includes about each recipient is a pertinent quote from the honoree. Hoare’s:

“There are two ways of constructing a software design; one way is to make it so simple that there are obviously no deficiencies, and the other way is to make it so complicated that there are no obvious deficiencies. The first method is far more difficult.”