Historical SunScript News and Events

• April 1998: Last team member found new home. Technically, I (Laurent Demailly) was the last group member to find a new home. As I also was the acting webmaster, this web site will not be updated anymore! Being part of the Tcl/Tk development team was a short (less than a year) but fun experience for me! See http://www.scriptics.com/ and http://tcl.activestate.com/ for updates about the Tcl world.
  
  
• February 1998: Thread-safe Tcl Released. The Tcl 8.1a2 release features thread safety. These new releases also fix some bugs in the 8.1a1 release and improve the speed of the regular expression package somewhat.
  
  
• February 1998: Ousterhout forms Scriptics. The Palo Alto company will sell Tcl-based products and services to the corporate community, beginning with a Tcl development environment called TclPro.
  Statement from Bert Sutherland, Director of Sun Microsystems Laboratories
  
  
• January 1998: Tcl/Tk 8.1a1 released. These new releases of the Tcl/Tk core include Unicode support for internationalization and a new regular expression package.
  
  
• January 1998: Tcl Plugin 2.0 final release.
  
  
• December 1997: New look and unified page generation tools for the web server.
  
  
• November 1997: Tcl/Tk 8.0 p2 version released.. The 8.0p2 release is a bug fix release for 8.0 that subsumes the short-lived p1 release.
  
  
• October 1997: Jacl and Tcl Blend alpha 1 Released. Jacl is a new 100% Java implementation of Tcl 8.0. Tcl Blend is a Tcl extension that allows you to load and use the Java VM from Tcl. Both provide Tcl extensions that allow you to script Java.

  The Browser Plugin 2.0 released The Tcl/Tk web browser plugin is now freely available. The 2.0 release features configurable security policies.
  
  

• September 1997: SpecTcl 1.1 Freely Available. This drag-and-drop GUI builder for Tk and Java interfaces makes development even easier.
  
  
• August 1997: Tcl Style Guide Released. The Tcl group at Sun Microsystems has recently adopted these style guidelines for Tcl coding. We strongly encourage you to use these guidelines for your Tcl projects as well!
  
  
• August 1997: Tcl/Tk 8.0 final version released.. The 8.0 release features an on-the-fly compiler for 2 to 20 times speed improvements, native look and feel on Macintosh and Windows platform, and much more.
  
  
• July 1997: 5th Annual Tcl/Tk Workshop. held in Boston. Over 200 attendees from a broad variety of industry and research enjoyed tutorials, technical papers, keynotes by Brian Kernighan and John Ousterhout, and various Birds of a Feather sessions.
  
  
• April 1997: SunScript formed. Sun features Tcl/Tk as the www.sun.com cover story. SunScript initiates 'Partners Program'.
• January 1997: SpecTcl 1.0 released.
  
  
• December 1996: Electronic Engineering Times covers Embedded Systems, comparing Java and Tcl/Tk.
  
  
• September 1996: SunScript offers the Tcl Powered Logo to developers! Get it.
  
  
• July 1996: Sun's home page introduces Tcl Plugin. Read what the reviewers said about Tcl/Tk technology.  
  
  
• July 1996: Press Release: Sun Microsystems introduces new Tcl/Tk Plugin for Netscape Navigator(TM) 3.0
  
  
• April 1996: Tcl 7.5 and Tk 4.1 released. These are the first versions of Tcl and Tk to run on Macintosh and Windows platforms. However, Tk still uses Motif look and feel everywhere.
  
  
• January 1995: Work begins on Windows and Macintosh ports.
  
  
• May 1994: JO joins Sun Microsystems, Tcl/Tk team begins to form at Sun Microsystems Laboratories. First members of the team are Scott Stanton, Ray Johnson, and Stephen Uhler.
  
  
• Summer 1992: Canvas and text widgets released in Tk 2.0 and 2.2, respectively, greatly increasing the usability of Tk.
  
  
• March 1991: Tk 1.0 released (no text or canvas widgets).
  
  
• January 1991: JO presents first papers on Tk at USENIX and the X Conference.
  
  
• January 1990: JO presents first paper on Tcl at USENIX. Don Libes starts work on Expect.
  
  
• Fall 1989: JO begins releasing Tcl sources. Implementation of Tk begins at U.C. Berkeley and DEC Western Research Laboratory.
  
  
• Spring 1988: Implementation of Tcl begins at U.C. Berkeley. The first application for Tcl is a windowing text editor named Mx.
  
  
• Fall 1987: John Ousterhout gets the idea for Tcl as a way of providing better command languages for interactive tools such as those for electronic CAD.