John Ousterhout

John Kenneth Ousterhout (born October 15, 1954 in Solano County , California ) is an American computer scientist . He is co-founder and Chairman of the Board of Electric Cloud Inc. He gained greater fame as the inventor of the Tcl programming language . He also has an excellent reputation as an expert in graphical user interfaces and distributed operating systems.

Ousterhout studied at Yale University from 1971 , where he received a bachelor's degree in physics in 1975. In 1980 he received the Ph.D. in computer science from Carnegie Mellon University .

From 1980 to 1994 he was a professor in the computer science department at the University of California, Berkeley . The development of the Sprite network operating system, the first log-based file system, the VLSI layout program Magic , the programming language Tcl and the GUI library Tk, initially intended exclusively for Tcl, all took place during this period . In 1994 he switched to Sun Microsystems as a Distinguished Engineer , as Sun intended to build Tcl as a second "web language" alongside Java . After this hope was not fulfilled for Ousterhout, he left Sun in 1998. The further development of Tcl and Tk was taken over by Scriptics Inc. , which he founded in the same year. Shortly after his company was renamed Ajuba Solutions in 2000, Interwoven took over. In 2002 he started Electric Cloud Inc. together with John Graham-Cumming .

In 1987 he received the Grace Murray Hopper Award and in 1989 the NAS Award for Initiatives in Research . He has also received awards such as the ACM Software System Award , the National Science Foundation Presidential Young Investigator Award, and the UC Berkeley Distinguished Teaching Award . He has been a Fellow of the Association for Computing Machinery since 1994 .

Since 2008 Ousterhout has been a professor in the Department of Computer Science at Stanford University .

Web links

• John Ousterhout's home page in Stanford
• Electric cloud