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Mike Cowlishaw FREng BSc CEng FIET FBCS CITP
Mike Cowlishaw worked for IBM pre-University and as a student in 1971–1974, and then joined IBM’s UK Laboratory at Hursley in 1974 with a BSc in Electronic Engineering from the University of Birmingham. Until 1980, he worked on the design and implementation of the hardware and software of microprocessor-based display test equipment and a design automation system. Any spare time was spent exploring the human–machine interface, including implementation of the STET Structured Editing Tool (a ‘folding’ editor which gives a tree-like structure to programs or documentation), several compilers and assemblers, and the Rexx programming language. In 1980 Mike was assigned to the IBM T.J.Watson Research Center, at Yorktown Heights, NY, to work on an experimental vector text display with real-time formatting and on enhancements to the VM operating system. In 1982 he moved to the IBM UK Scientific Centre in Winchester, England, to work on colour perception and the modelling of brain mechanisms (along with TOOLS -- a large-scale conferencing and software distribution system which became the VM/DSNX product).
In 1985 he was seconded to the Oxford University Press to write a syntax-directed colour-coding editor for the SGML text of the second edition of the Oxford English Dictionary. That editor (the live parsing editor, called LEXX) and its LPEX derivatives became part of the IBM VisualAge range of products, running on VM/CMS, OS/2, OS/400, AIX, Windows, and Java. Mike remains a consultant to the Oxford English Dictionary.
From 1986 to 1990 Mike worked in the IBM UK Laboratories Systems Technology Group on SGML and electronic publishing, working on the ISO standards for SGML and specializing in CD-ROM, PostScript, formatting, and indexing. This led to him working on Internet technologies, including HTTP 1.0 (RFC 1945), in the early 1990s.
In 1995, Mike ported the Java Virtual Machine (JVM) to OS/2 and also led the technical assessment of the Java platform which resulted in its being adopted throughout IBM’s products. Since then he has designed and implemented NetRexx (a version of Rexx for the Java platform) and other languages for the JVM. In 1998 and 1999 he was Project Editor for the ECMAScript (JavaScript) international standard (now ISO 16262).
Since 1999, he has been working on new decimal arithmetic packages (including IBM’s BigDecimal class for Java and the decNumber C library), decimal encodings for hardware representations, and decimal hardware architecture. He is the author of the General Decimal Arithmetic specifications (see http://speleotrove.com/decimal/), and was the Specification Lead for the decimal arithmetic enhancements included in Java 5 in 2004. He has championed the addition of the new decimal types and arithmetic to the new IEEE 754 standard and to the C, C++, COBOL, and other languages, and is active in the related work of a number of standards organizations, including ECMA, ISO, ANSI, IEEE, BSI, and W3C. He was the Editor of the IEEE 754 standard during its eight ballots in 2007 and 2008, and is a member of the Program Committee for the IEEE Symposium on Computer Arithmetic.
Mike was a founder member of the IBM Academy of Technology in 1989, and was elected to its Technology Council in 1989, 1990, and 1997, serving seven years in all. He has received many IBM awards, including Invention Plateaux and patent awards, several Outstanding Technical Achievement and Distinguished Contribution awards, and a Corporate Award for Outstanding Technical Innovation. In 1990 he was named an IBM Fellow, which allows him to work on projects of his own choosing.
Mike was elected Fellow of the Institution of Electrical Engineers (now IET) in 1997, Fellow of the Royal Academy of Engineering in 1999, and Fellow of the British Computer Society in 1999. He has been a Visiting Professor in the Department of Computer Science at the University of Warwick since 1999.
Legend: FREng – Fellow of the Royal Academy of Engineering; BSc – Bachelor of Science; CEng – Chartered Engineer; FIET – Fellow of the Institute of Engineering and Technology (was IEE); FBCS – Fellow of the British Computer Society; CITP – Chartered Information Technology Professional. Java is a trademark of Sun Microsystems Inc.