Johns F. (Jeff) Rulifson is a computer scientist largely known for his involvement at Stanford Research Institute (SRI) in implementing the On-Line System (NLS), a system that foreshadowed many future developments in modern computing and networking. Rulifson later left SRI to join Xerox PARC during the 1970's in the Scientific Systems Lab (SSL). While at PARC, he worked on implementing distributed office systems. Rulifson was also an instrumental figure during the early days of the ARPANET before moving to PARC. He also developed the Decode-Encode Language (DEL), which is documented in the early history of ARPANET. Although never used, DEL was an early precursor to Sun Microsystems's Java programming language. In 1990, Rulifson won the Association for Computing Machinery's Software System Award for implementing such groundbreaking innovations such as hypertext, outline processors, and video conferencing. He currently works for Sun Microsystems Laboratories, Europe.
