Ousterhout was previously a professor of computer science at University of California, Berkeley, where he created the Tcl scripting language and the Tk platform-independent widget toolkit, and proposed the idea of coscheduling.

[2] Ousterhout also led the team that developed the Magic VLSI computer-aided design (CAD) program.

[4] Ousterhout received the Grace Murray Hopper Award in 1987 for his work on electronic design automation CAD systems for very-large-scale integrated circuits.

[6] Ousterhout was elected a member of the National Academy of Engineering in 2001 for improving our ability to program computers by raising the level of abstraction.

After several years at Sun, he left and co-founded Scriptics, Inc. (later renamed Ajuba Solutions) in January 1998 to provide professional Tcl development tools.