Hints and Principles for Computer System Design, Butler Lampson 1983

arxiv.org

39 points·mbkv··5 comments

This is not his 1983 paper, but an updated version (May 14, 2021).

The abstract states:

This new long version of my 1983 paper suggests the goals you might have for your system— Simple, Timely, Efficient, Adaptable, Dependable, Yummy (STEADY)—and techniques for achieving them—Approximate, Incremental, Divide & Conquer (AID). It also gives some princi- ples for system design that are more than just hints, and many examples of how to apply the ideas.

Lampson, for those who don't have heard of him, was one of the main forces behind the Xerox Alto (first PC with a graphical user interface) and WYSIWYG text editing (just to name a few, see https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Butler_Lampson).

Lampson keeps a link to his latest revision of this classic paper[0] on his website at Microsoft Research. I read the original, but haven't managed to wade through the revision. You could say that he's developed a few more hints over the course of his career.

[0] https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/research/publication/hints-a...

I just wanted to point out that the year in the title is wrong.

He also wrote one of the best early papers on access control: Butler W. Lampson. 1974. Protection. SIGOPS Oper. Syst. Rev. 8, 1 (January 1974), 18–24. DOI:https://doi.org/10.1145/775265.775268

Butler was a legend at Xerox, for many things besides speaking fast, but he did inspire "the milli-lampson" a unit of speaking speed. Only Butler could talk at 1000 milli-lampsons.

I only spoke to him once, and actually I don't think it was all that fast -- maybe 200 milli-lampsons. He probably slowed it down for my benefit.

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