John Ousterhout

Who is John Ousterhout?

John Kenneth Ousterhout 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 previously 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. Ousterhout also led the research group that designed the experimental Sprite operating system and the first log-structured file system. Ousterhout is also the original 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.