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Tcl/Tk originated with
Dr. John Ousterhout (pronounced
"Oh'-stir-howt") while teaching at University of California, Berkeley, Califor
nia.
He actually started implementing it when he got back to Berkeley in the spring
of 1988; by summer of that year it was in use in some internal applications,
but there was no Tk. Read about the history of Tcl/Tk directly from its author
's
words at
www.scripti cs.com/scripting/tclHistory.html.
- 1989: The first external releases of Tcl and beginning of Tk imp
lemention;
- 1991: First release of Tk;
- 1994: Dr. Ousterhout was hired by Sun Microsystems, Inc.: he was
a Distinguished
Engineer and led the Tcl project.
- April/May 1997: the Sun research group responsible for Tcl devel
opment
were spun off into a Sun business group called SunScript. However, things chan
ged
again soon afterwards. You can read more about that evolution selecting "SunSc
ript_story"
at URL:
Su nScript-Story .
- August 1997: a Tcl Consortium was formed.
- February 1998: Dr. Ousterhout left Sun to create
Scriptics, a company dedicated
to scripting tools, applications, and services. According to
www.scriptics.com /about/news/qa.html,
core Tcl and Tk remain free, with the team at Sun continuing work right now
on Tcl/Tk 8.1. After the next release, the intention is that work on the core
will migrate from Sun to Scriptics, with the Sun team will focus more on Tcl
extensions and applications.
- April 23, 1998: the Association for Computing Machinery
ACM awarded the 1997 Software System
Award to John Ousterhout and Scriptics (
www.acm.org/awards/). This award
is given to an institution or individual recognized for developing a software
system that has had a lasting influence, reflected in contributions to concept
s,
in commercial acceptance, or both.
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