IMMEDIATE
New York, April 23, 1998...The Association for Computing Machinery (ACM) has named Dr. John Ousterhout as the recipient of the 1997 Software System Award. The award, which recognizes the development of a software system that has a lasting influence, will be presented on May 10, 1998 during a special awards banquet at ACM's Policy 98 Conference in Washington, DC. The Award is accompanied by a $10,000 prize. Financial support is provided by IBM.
Dr. Ousterhout will be honored for his work with Tool Command Language (Tcl) and its toolkit (Tk). "The Tcl scripting language and its companion Tk user interface toolkit have proved to be a powerful combination. Tcl is widely used as the glue that allows developers to create complex systems using preexisting systems as their components. As one of the first embeddable scripting languages, Tcl has revolutionized the creation of customizable and extensible applications. Tk provides a much simpler mechanism to construct graphical user interfaces than traditional programming languages. The overall Tcl/Tk system has had substantial impact through its wide use in the developer community and thousands of successful commercial applications."
Dr. Ousterhout's career has spanned a number of projects in academia and industry. He is currently CEO of Scriptics Corporation, which he founded in early 1998 to further develop Tcl/Tk. From 1994-1998 he was a Distinguished Engineer at Sun Microsystems, leading Sun's Tcl development effort. He was a professor of computer science at Berkeley from 1980 to 1994, where he led research projects in operating systems and EDA tools, and created the initial versions of Tcl/Tk. Dr. Ousterhout received a B.S. in physics from Yale University and a Ph.D. in computer science from Carnegie Mellon University. He is also a Fellow of the ACM and has received numerous awards such as the ACM Grace Murray Hopper Award, US National Science Foundational Presidential Young Investigator Award, and the U.C Berkeley Distinguished Teaching Award.
About The ACM
ACM is a major force in advancing the skills of information technology professionals and students. ACM serves its global membership by delivering cutting-edge information and by transferring ideas from theory to practice. ACM, with its world class journals and magazines, dynamic special interest groups, numerous conferences, workshops and forums is a primary resource to the IT field. For more information about the ACM, visit our web site at http://www.acm.org.
About ACM Policy 98
The ACM Policy 98 Conference will be held in Washington, DC, May 10-12, 1998. Concerned with shaping the future applications of computing, the conference aims to increase the influence of computing professionals in policy decisions- by establishing an intellectual foundation for discussion, and by reaching out to policy makers. The Conference is sponsored by the USACM, the Association for Computing Machinery's Public Policy Committee, and targets audiences from industry, government, academia and journalism involved specifically with computing technology policy issues. For more information about Policy 98, please visit the web sit at http://www.acm.org/policy98.