John K. Ousterhout is founder and Chairman of Electric Cloud, Inc. He is also creator of the Tcl scripting language and is well known for his work in distributed operating systems, high-performance file systems, and user interfaces.
Prior to founding Electric Cloud, Ousterhout was founder and CEO of Scriptics Corporation, Distinguished Engineer at Sun Microsystems, and Professor of Computer Science at U.C. Berkeley.
Ousterhout is a member of the National Academy of Engineering and a Fellow of the ACM.
John: Well, my take on this is that Linux may have started off with a community of gung-ho users who were attracted by the freeness of it.
John: People like Eric Raymond think we are just at the beginning of the evolutionary development of open source software, and that all of these other applications will come about in time.
John: That ability wasn't the first thing on my mind when I was writing Tcl, but it turned out that in solving my problem, I had also built something that was very easy to use for developing general purpose GUIs.
Ousterhout, had worked as a distinguished engineer on Sun's SunScript project since being hired away from his position as a professor at the University of California at Berkeley in 1994.
Scriptics is, according to Ousterhout, "the first company devoted exclusively to scripting tools, applications, and services." Ousterhout's aim is to demonstrate to corporate America how his "gluing provides five to 10 times greater productivity" than traditional system languages.
Ousterhout says he has no immediate intention to own the resources, such as extensions, which are strategic for Scriptics.
JohnOusterhout is the original force behind the scripting programming language Tcl and the platform-independent GUI toolkit Tk, which he developed when he was professor at the University of California, Berkeley.
Ousterhout is additionally the original author of the VLSICAD program Magic.
Ousterhout designed the 4.4 BSD Log File System (LFS) but left the work unfinished....
In addition to founding Ajuba Solutions, recently acquired by Interwoven, Dr. Ousterhout is well known for his work in distributed operating systems, high-performance file systems, scripting languages, and user interfaces.
Dr. Ousterhout is perhaps best known as the inventor of the Tcl scripting language while at U.C. Berkeley.
Dr. Ousterhout is a fellow of the ACM and has received numerous awards, including the ACM Software System Award, the ACM Grace Murray Hopper Award, the National Science Foundation Presidential Young Investigator Award, and the U.C. Berkeley Distinguished Teaching Award.
The tools come from Scriptics, a company founded in January by JohnOusterhout, a former professor of computer science at the University of California at Berkeley.
Ousterhout developed Tcl in 1988 and made it available for free on the Internet.
Scripting languages, Ousterhout said he's learned, work very well with heterogeneous environments and component models.
DBLP: John K. Ousterhout(Site not responding. Last check: 2007-09-17)
John H. Hartman, John K. Ousterhout: Performance Measurements of a Multiprocessor Sprite Kernel.
John K. Ousterhout, Hervé Da Costa, David Harrison, John A. Kunze, Michael D. Kupfer, James G. Thompson: A Trace-Driven Analysis of the UNIX 4.2 BSD File System.
John K. Ousterhout, John A. Newkirk, Phil Petit, Howard E. Shrobe: Panel Discussion.
Amazon.co.uk: Tcl and the TK Toolkit (APC): Books: John K. Ousterhout(Site not responding. Last check: 2007-09-17)
JohnOusterhout, author of Tcl and Tk, wrote this book, the definitive guide to these systems, while at University of California at Berkeley.
Upon reading this book, you will learn how to produce far more powerful X Windows System applications in a fraction of the time that used to be required.
John's book provides a thorough explanation of both the use and the extension of Tcl/Tk.
John Ousterhout(Site not responding. Last check: 2007-09-17)
JohnOusterhout is the original force behind the award-winning Tcl and Tk development languages.
See http://purl.org/tcl/home/scripting/tclHistory.html for John's recounting of Tcl's early days.
See An Overview of Tcl and Tk, Writing Tcl-Based Applications in C, Building User Interfaces with Tcl and Tk, and An Introduction to Tcl Scripting, which are based on a series of powerpoint slides John used for tutorials.
wiki.tcl.tk /36 (190 words)
Magic Documentation Page(Site not responding. Last check: 2007-09-17)
Magic: A VLSI Layout System, JohnOusterhout, Gordon Hamachi, Robert Mayo, Walter Scott, and George Taylor, December 2, 1983 (scanned PDF).
Plowing: Interactive Stretching and Compaction in Magic, Walter Scott and JohnOusterhout, December 2, 1983 (scanned PDF).
A Switchbox Router with Obstacle Avoidance, Gordon Hamachi and JohnOusterhout, December 7, 1983 (scanned PDF).
Michael Tiemann helped found Cygnus on the idea that though the world's best compiler, GCC, was freely available, companies would still be willing to pay for support of and enhancements to that compiler.
Sun Microsystems has in many ways provided support for open-source development over the years, whether through donations of hardware and resources to help with the SPARC port of Linux, or through supporting development of JohnOusterhout'sTcl scripting language.
It's ironic, then, that the company that grew out of the joyous free software roots at Berkeley that Kirk McKusick describes so often struggles to grasp the significance of the Open Source phenomenon.
Paper Writing and Paper Reviewing(Site not responding. Last check: 2007-09-17)
People remember how well you handled your questions, since it demonstrates real familiarity with your material (anyone can rehearse and deliver a prepared talk on a topic they know little about).
Note: This is a page about writing technical papers, but many of the techniques also seem applicable to both non-technical writing and giving presentations.
JohnOusterhout delivered the following wisdom to his UC Berkeley CS 262 (advanced topics in operating systems) class in Fall 93, as the ISCA deadline approached.
