Software Tools Users Group
The Software Tools Users Group 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, providing the capabilities and features of Unix in a non-proprietary system. With its focus on building clean, portable, reusable code shared amongst multiple applications and runnable on any operating system, the Software Tools movement reestablished the tradition of open source and the concepts of empowering users to define, develop, control, and freely distribute their computing environment.
History
In 1976, Brian Kernighan and P. J. Plauger 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.Software Tools demonstrated "Unix thinking" with programs in Ratfor, later rewritten in Pascal for a follow-up edition of the book. Kernighan's Ratfor 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, 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, providing an almost complete set of the Unix tools, a Unix-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 operating systems and a users group of more than 2000.
An LBNL research report appeared in Communications of the ACM 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.In 1993 Scherrer had previously been honored with a “UNIX Academic Driver” award presented by Bell Labs, for “Outstanding Contributions to the UNIX community”. Her work included the Software Tools movement as well as contributions to USENIX.