The Computer Systems Group at the University of Waterloo has been engaged in software engineering research for almost 40 years. Current research is directed toward understanding how component-based software is designed and constructed by developing theories and then testing these theories in practice through the implementation of operational software systems. The most recent systems are the ones described collectively as Community Learning Spaces, which are built entirely from software components and described elsewhere in this document.

Community Learning Spaces are the latest in a long tradition of software systems that have been developed by CSG over its 40-year history. Educational, government and business establishments in more than 40 countries have adopted more than 3000 copies of CSG software systems over the years.

These software systems and tools include high-speed compilers with excellent error diagnostics for the programming languages BASIC, C, COBOL (WATBOL), FORTRAN (WATFOR and WATFIV), Modula-2, Pascal and PROLOG; interactive editors; interactive programming systems; operating systems and local area networks (JANET, MacJANET and ARIES).