Fraser was born in Surrey, England and spent the war years with his family in Lancashire and subsequently in Weston Super Mare.

In 1966 he returned to Cambridge as a Senior Technical Officer[7] and later (from 1968) as faculty-level Assistant Director of Research[8] in the Computer Laboratory.

[citation needed] At Bell Labs in the 1970s, Fraser became deeply involved with the development of the Unix operating system.

[19][20] He also originated the Unix Circuit Design System (UCDS) with Steve Bourne, Joe Condon and Andrew Hume.

His 1983 paper was among the first to propose ubiquitous networking connectivity:[citation needed] Ubiquity in telecommunications suggests a standard wall socket distributed about as widely as electric power outlets are now.

[31]: 15 Fraser was a member of the National Academy of Engineering,[32] and a Fellow of the British Computer Society and IEEE for contributions and leadership in the design of switched virtual circuit networks.