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STUG Award
The award recognizes significant contributions to the community that
reflect the spirit and character demonstrated by those who came together
in the Software Tools User Group (STUG). Recipients of the annual STUG
award conspicuously exhibit a contribution to the reusable code-base
available to all and/or the provision a significant, enabling technology
directly to users in a widely-available form.
2004: M. Douglas McIlroy
When people think of UNIX, many things come to mind.
Certainly there were smaller operating systems, but few that did so much in so
little space. There were operating systems better at real time, some
that were better
at timesharing or some other specific function.
The one thing, however, that most people think
about when they think of UNIX
is the power of the command line interface and the
elegance of the pipe and filter model. While many people
have added to this interface, contributing
tools and programs over the years, one name stands out as
a significant contributor, one who originally wrote some
of the most basic and timeless tools for this system.
Doug McIlroy helped develop the concept of pipes and stream processing.
In order to demonstrate the concept of stream programming, he wrote
the original UNIX version of such tools as sort(1), spell(1), diff(1),
join(1), graph(1), speak(1), and tr(1), among others.
He also had a major influence on the design of macros. In addition,
he has made contributions to various computer languages such
as Lisp, PL/1, and TMG, and he helped influence Snobol, Altran, and C++.
It is for these contributions to the development of small, reusable
tools, the very basis of the STUG award, that USENIX is proud to have
given the STUG Award for 2004 to M. Douglas McIlroy.
2003: CVS (the Concurrent Versioning System)
Without CVS, it wouldn't be possible for any number of people
to work on the same code without interfering with each other. It can be
argued that without remote-collaboration tools such as CVS, most of the
larger Free and Open Source software that is available today could not have existed,
for while individuals can produce significant software, collaborative
methods are often needed for complex and wide-ranging projects. Therefore
USENIX awards the 2003 STUG award to the CVS program and its four main authors, Dick Grune, Brian Berliner, Jeff Polk, and Jim Kingdon, authors of modern CVS, arguably the
essential enabling technology of distributed development.
- Dick Grune: The original author of the CVS shell script, written in July 1986, Dick is also credited with many of the CVS conflict resolution algorithms. He developed the script at the Free University of Amsterdam (Vrije Universiteit),
where he teaches principles of programming languages and compiler
construction. He was involved in constructing Algol 68 compilers in the
1970s and participated in the Amsterdam Compiler Kit in the 1980s. He is
co-author of three books: Programming Language Essentials, Modern Compiler
Design, and Parsing Techniques: A Practical Guide.
- Brian Berliner: Coder and designer of the first translation of the CVS scripts to the C language, in April
1989, Brian based his design on the original work done by Dick Grune.
- Jeff Polk: Jeff rewrote most of the code of CVS 1.2. He made just about
everything dynamic (by using malloc), added a generic hashed
list manager, rewrote the modules' database parsing in a
compatible but extended way, generalized directory
hierarchy recursion for virtually all the commands, generalized the
loginfo file to be used for pre-commit checks and commit templates,
wrote a new and flexible RCS parser, fixed an uncountable number of
bugs, and helped in the design of future CVS features.
- Jim Kingdon: While at Cygnus, in 1993 Jim made the first remote CVS, which ran over TCP or rsh or kerberos'd rsh, and eventually over TCP/IP. The remote-CVS protocol enabled real use of CVS by the open source community; before remote CVS, everyone had to log in to a central server, copy their patches there, etc. Some years later, Jim formed Cyclic, a company which offered CVS support and
development.
2002: The Apache Foundation
2001: Kerberos
The 2001 Annual Award recipients are those who contributed to the development of Kerberos, a security system that set the standard for authentication and key management in distributed systems.
Kerberos is a security system that set the standard for authentication and key management in distributed systems, is based on the revolutionary Needham and Schroeder protocol of 1978. It is a prime example of how to turn a theoretical result into a useful system. The need for authenticating users and services in a distributed environment is critical, and Kerberos provides a solution that is secure, relatively simple to administer, and scalable. Because of this, Kerberos has been implemented as part of the Distributed Computer Environment (DCE), the Andrew File Systems (AFS), and is also part of Windows 2000. No single security system has had as much impact on the way security is managed in distributed networks as Kerberos. Read the acceptance remarks and special thanks for the 2001 Stug award.
2000: Tatu Ylönen
The 2000 Annual Award goes to Tatu Ylönen
for his work developing SSH. The SSH Secure Shell encrypts all traffic,
and provides a high level of protection against hacker attacks. SSH
provides secure remote
logins and remote command execution, key management functions, terminal
emulation, fully integrated file transfers, and tunneling of X11 traffic.
In addition it has been incorporated into other tools such as rsync for
secure remote administration tasks. SSH introduced a simple yet robust
protocol at a time when encryption over the Internet was rare, and enjoyed
rapid and wide deployemnt.
Tatu Ylönen developed SSH while a graduate student at the Helsinki
University of Technology in Finland in the early 1990s. He is a founder of
SSH Communications Security.
1999: Udi Manber
The 1999 award went to Udi Manber for turning algorithms into tools
for searching and resource discovery. Udi Manber is the Chief Scientist at
Yahoo!. Before joining Yahoo! in 1998, he was a professor of Computer
Science at the University of Arizona. He wrote more than 50 technical
articles, 3 of which won best paper awards, co-developed Agrep,
Glimpse, Harvest, and the Search Broker, and wrote a popular textbook
on design of algorithms.
1998: John Ousterhout
The 1998 award went to John Ousterhout for Tcl/Tk, the software tools
for which he is best known. Together or separately, Tcl/Tk are much
used, and they exhibit the spirit that STUG was founded to encourage:
portability, adaptability to seemingly unfriendly environments, and
clarity of concept.
1997: Larry Wall
The 1997 award went to Larry Wall in recognition of his major
contributions to software portability and re-use of code, embodied in
the public domain 'Config' program and the Perl language.
1996: Michael Tiemann
The first STUG was awarded in 1996 to Michael Tiemann for his work in
C++ which led to fundamental contributions to GCC, the GNU C Compiler.
The GNU C compiler has had an unparalleled influence upon the
availability of efficient and standard code on a vast number of hardware
platforms. GCC has provided a development base for thousands of
projects.
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