John Ousterhout

John Kenneth Ousterhout (/ˈoʊstərhaʊt/, born October 15, 1954) is the chairman of Electric Cloud, Inc. and a professor of computer science at Stanford University. He founded Electric Cloud with John Graham-Cumming. Ousterhout was a professor of computer science at University of California, Berkeley where he created the Tcl scripting language and the Tk platform-independent widget toolkit, and proposed the idea of coscheduling. Ousterhout also led the research group that designed the experimental Sprite operating system and the first log-structured file system. Ousterhout is the author of the Magic VLSI Computer-aided design program.

He received his Bachelor's degree in Physics from Yale University in 1975, and his Ph.D. in computer science from Carnegie Mellon University in 1980.

Ousterhout received the Grace Murray Hopper Award in 1987 for his work on CAD systems for very-large-scale integrated circuits. For the same work, he was inducted in 1994 as a Fellow of the Association for Computing Machinery. Ousterhout is a member of the National Academy of Engineering.

In 1994, Ousterhout left Berkeley to join Sun Microsystems Laboratories, which hired a team to join him in Tcl development. After several years at Sun, he left and co-founded Scriptics, Inc. (later renamed Ajuba Solutions) in January 1998 to provide professional Tcl development tools. Most of the Tcl team followed him from Sun. Ajuba was purchased by Interwoven in October 2000. He joined the faculty of Stanford University in 2008.

Selected works

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