The Software Tools Users Group (STUG) was a technical organization started in 1976, in parallel with Usenix. The STUG goal was to develop a powerful and portable Unix-like system that could be implemented on top of virtually any

operating system An operating system (OS) is system software that manages computer hardware, software resources, and provides common services for computer programs. Time-sharing operating systems schedule tasks for efficient use of the system and may also in ...

, providing the capabilities and features of

Unix Unix (; trademarked as UNIX) is a family of multitasking, multiuser computer operating systems that derive from the original AT&T Unix, whose development started in 1969 at the Bell Labs research center by Ken Thompson, Dennis Ritchie, and ot ...

in a non-proprietary system. With its focus on building clean, portable, reusable code shared amongst multiple applications and runnable on any

, the Software Tools movement reestablished the tradition of

open source Open source is source code that is made freely available for possible modification and redistribution. Products include permission to use the source code, design documents, or content of the product. The open-source model is a decentralized sof ...

and the concepts of empowering users to define, develop, control, and freely distribute their computing environment.

History

In 1976,

Brian Kernighan Brian Wilson Kernighan (; born 1942) is a Canadian computer scientist. He worked at Bell Labs and contributed to the development of Unix alongside Unix creators Ken Thompson and Dennis Ritchie. Kernighan's name became widely known through co-au ...

(then of

Bell Labs Nokia Bell Labs, originally named Bell Telephone Laboratories (1925–1984), then AT&T Bell Laboratories (1984–1996) and Bell Labs Innovations (1996–2007), is an American industrial research and scientific development company owned by mult ...

) and

P. J. Plauger Phillip James (P.J. or Bill) Plauger (; born January 13, 1944, Petersburg, West Virginia) is an author, entrepreneur and computer programmer. He has written and co-written articles and books about programming style, software tools, and the C pr ...

published Software Tools, the first of their books on programming inspired by the recent creation of the Unix operating system by Kernighan's colleagues at Bell Labs. The "Software Tools" series spread the essence of "C/Unix thinking" with makeovers for Fortran and

Pascal Pascal, Pascal's or PASCAL may refer to: People and fictional characters * Pascal (given name), including a list of people with the name * Pascal (surname), including a list of people and fictional characters with the name ** Blaise Pascal, Fren ...

. Kernighan's

Ratfor Ratfor (short for ''Rational Fortran'') is a programming language implemented as a preprocessor for Fortran 66. It provides modern control structures, unavailable in Fortran 66, to replace GOTOs and statement numbers. Features Ratfor provides ...

(rational FORTRAN preprocessor) was eventually put in the public domain. Deborah K. Scherrer, Dennis E. Hall, and Joseph S. Sventek, then researchers at the

Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory (LBNL), commonly referred to as the Berkeley Lab, is a United States Department of Energy National Labs, United States national laboratory that is owned by, and conducts scientific research on behalf of, t ...

quickly picked up the Software Tools book and philosophy. They expanded the initial set of a few dozen tools from the book into an entire Virtual Operating System (VOS), providing an almost complete set of the

tools, a

-like programming library, and an operating system interface that could be implemented on top of virtually any system. They freely distributed their VOS collection worldwide. Their work generated ports of the software to over 50

s and a users group of more than 2000. An LBNL research report appeared in

Communications of the ACM ''Communications of the ACM'' is the monthly journal of the Association for Computing Machinery (ACM). It was established in 1958, with Saul Rosen as its first managing editor. It is sent to all ACM members. Articles are intended for readers with ...

in September 1980. Scherrer, also on the Usenix Board at the Time, established and coordinated the Software Tools Users Group, aligning itself with Usenix Starting in 1979, STUG and Usenix held parallel conferences. STUG also produced a series of newsletters. STUG also coordinated with the European Unix Users Group and spawned similar groups in other parts of the world. The Software Tools movement eventually triggered several commercial companies to port and distribute the Software Tools to microcomputer systems such as CP/M and MS-DOS.

Awards

On January 24, 1996, Scherrer's, Hall's, and Sventek's work was recognized with a USENIX Lifetime Achievement Award (“The Flame”). In 1993 Scherrer had previously been honored with a “

UNIX Unix (; trademarked as UNIX) is a family of multitasking, multiuser computer operating systems that derive from the original AT&T Unix, whose development started in 1969 at the Bell Labs research center by Ken Thompson, Dennis Ritchie, and ot ...

Academic Driver” award presented by

, for “Outstanding Contributions to the

community”. Her work included the Software Tools movement as well as contributions to USENIX.

Other Major Contributors

The Software Tools project was the result of efforts from hundreds of people at many, many sites. The USENIX STUG Lifetime Achievement Award includes the names of many, but certainly not all, major contributors to the Software Tools project.

Legacy

By the late-1980s,

was becoming more available,

Microsoft Microsoft Corporation is an American multinational technology corporation producing computer software, consumer electronics, personal computers, and related services headquartered at the Microsoft Redmond campus located in Redmond, Washing ...

had taken over the PC market, and the need for the VOS environment started to subside. The STUG group decided to discontinue, choosing to donate the group's financial legacy to endow a yearly USENIX “STUG Award”. This award “recognizes significant contributions to the community that reflect the spirit and character demonstrated by those who came together in the Software Tools Users Group. Recipients of the annual STUG Award conspicuously exhibit a contribution to the reusable code base to all and/or the provision of a significant enabling technology to users in a widely available form.” .

Peter H. Salus Peter Henry Salus is a linguist, computer scientist, historian of technology, author in many fields, and an editor of books and journals. He has conducted research in germanistics, language acquisition, and computer languages. Education and c ...

“STUG 20 Years Ago”. ;login: vol 29 #2, April 2004: 33.

References

{{reflist Lifetime achievement awards Open-source movement Unix history Unix programming tools User groups

History

Awards

Other Major Contributors

Legacy

See also

References