Development of Text Processing System Honored
MOUNTAIN VIEW, Calif. March 11, 1991. The Association for Computing Machinery (ACM) presented its 1990 ACM Software Systems Award to Jeff Rulifson and Bill English of Sun Microsystems and Doug Engelbart of Stanford University for their development of NLS, a pioneering computer-based text processing system. The award is given annually to institutions or individuals recognized for developing software systems that have had a lasting influence on the computer industry. Previous winners include the developers of UNIX(R), PostScript(R), VisiCalc and SMALLTALK.
Rulifson, English and Engelbart developed the NLS system at the Stanford Research Institute during the mid-1960s to experiment with software and hardware tools that would make people more productive using computers. Technologies based on the system include interactive display-based editing using a mouse, hypertext, outline processors and video conferencing. The early work done on NLS is the foundation for many of today's research systems and desktop software applications: for example, hypertext systems are becoming widely used in educational libraries.