During the 1960s, Lampson and others were part of Project GENIE at UC Berkeley. In 1965, several Project GENIE members, specifically Lampson and Peter Deutsch, developed the Berkeley Timesharing System for Scientific Data Systems' SDS 940 computer. After completing his doctorate, Lampson stayed on at UC Berkeley as an assistant professor and associate professor of computer science. For a period of time, he concurrently served as director of system development for the Berkeley Computer Corporation. In 1971, Lampson became one of the founding members of Xerox PARC, where he worked in the Computer Science Laboratory as a principal scientist and senior research fellow. His now-famous vision of a personal computer was captured in the 1972 memo entitled "Why Alto?". In 1973, the Xerox Alto, with its three-button mouse and full-page-sized monitor, was born. It is now considered to be the first actual personal computer in terms of what has become the "canonical" GUI mode of operation. All the subsequent computers built at Xerox PARC except for the "Dolphin" and the "Dorado" followed a general blueprint called "Wildflower", written by Lampson, and this included the D-Series Machines: the "Dandelion", "Dandetiger",, "Daybreak", and "Dicentra". At PARC, Lampson helped work on many other revolutionary technologies, such as laser printer design; two-phase commit protocols; Bravo, the first WYSIWYGtext formatting program; and Ethernet, the first high-speed local area network. He designed several influential programming languages such as Euclid. Following the acrimonious resignation of Xerox PARC CSL manager Bob Taylor in 1983, Lampson and Chuck Thacker followed their longtime colleague to Digital Equipment Corporation's Systems Research Center. There, he was a senior consulting engineer, corporate consulting engineer and senior corporate consulting engineer. Shortly before Taylor's retirement, Lampson left to work for Microsoft Research as an architect, distinguished engineer and technical fellow. Since 1987, Lampson has been an adjunct professor of electrical engineering and computer science at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.
In 2006, he was inducted as a Fellow of the Computer History Museum "for fundamental contributions to computer science, including networked personal workstations, operating systems, computer security and document publishing." Computer History Museum Fellow
In 2006, he received the IFIP TC11 Kristian Beckman Award for information security.
Lampson is often quoted as saying, "Any problem in computer science can be solved with another level of indirection," but in his Turing Award Lecture in 1993, Lampson himself attributes this saying to David Wheeler.
