Mike Cowlishaw is a Fellow of the

Royal Academy of Engineering The Royal Academy of Engineering (RAEng) is the United Kingdom's national academy of engineering. The Academy was founded in June 1976 as the Fellowship of Engineering with support from Prince Philip, Duke of Edinburgh, who became the first senio ...

. and sometime visiting professor at the Department of Computer Science at the

University of Warwick The University of Warwick ( ; abbreviated as ''Warw.'' in post-nominal letters) is a public research university on the outskirts of Coventry between the West Midlands and Warwickshire, England. The university was founded in 1965 as part of ...

. He is a retired

IBM Fellow An IBM Fellow is a position at IBM appointed by the CEO. Typically only four to nine (eleven in 2014) IBM Fellows are appointed each year, in May or June. Fellow is the highest honor a scientist, engineer, or programmer at IBM can achieve. Over ...

, and was a Fellow of the Institute of Engineering and Technology, and the

British Computer Society image:Maurice Vincent Wilkes 1980 (3).jpg, Sir Maurice Wilkes served as the first President of BCS in 1957. The British Computer Society (BCS), branded BCS, The Chartered Institute for IT, since 2009, is a professional body and a learned ...

. He was educated at

Monkton Combe School Monkton Combe School is a public school ( fee-charging boarding and day school), in the village of Monkton Combe near Bath in Somerset, England. History Monkton Combe School was founded in 1868 by the Revd. Francis Pocock, a former curate ...

and the

University of Birmingham The University of Birmingham (informally Birmingham University) is a Public university, public research university in Birmingham, England. It received its royal charter in 1900 as a successor to Queen's College, Birmingham (founded in 1825 as ...

Career at IBM

Cowlishaw was a pre-University student in 1971 and joined IBM in 1974 as an electronic engineer but is best known as a programmer and writer. He is known for designing and implementing the

Rexx Rexx (restructured extended executor) is a high-level programming language developed at IBM by Mike Cowlishaw. Both proprietary and open-source software, open source Rexx interpreter (computing), interpreters exist for a wide range of comput ...

programming language (1984), the TOOLSRUN and TOOLS packages used within IBM to create the IBMPC Conferencing Disk, his work on colour perception and image processing that led to the formation of

JPEG JPEG ( , short for Joint Photographic Experts Group and sometimes retroactively referred to as JPEG 1) is a commonly used method of lossy compression for digital images, particularly for those images produced by digital photography. The degr ...

(1985), the STET

folding editor Code or text folding, or less commonly holophrasting, is a feature of some graphical user interfaces that allows the user to selectively hide ("fold") or display ("unfold") parts of a document. This allows the user to manage large amounts of text ...

(1977), the

LEXX ''Lexx'' (also known as ''LEXX: The Dark Zone Stories'' and ''Tales from a Parallel Universe'') is a science fiction television series created by Lex Gigeroff and brothers Paul Donovan (writer), Paul and Michael Donovan (producer), Michael Dono ...

live parsing editor with colour highlighting for the

Oxford English Dictionary The ''Oxford English Dictionary'' (''OED'') is the principal historical dictionary of the English language, published by Oxford University Press (OUP), a University of Oxford publishing house. The dictionary, which published its first editio ...

(1985), electronic publishing,

SGML The Standard Generalized Markup Language (SGML; International Organization for Standardization, ISO 8879:1986) is a standard for defining generalized markup languages for documents. ISO 8879 Annex A.1 states that generalized markup is "based on t ...

applications, the IBM

Jargon File The Jargon File is a glossary and usage dictionary of slang used by computer programmers. The original Jargon File was a collection of terms from technical cultures such as the MIT Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory, MIT AI Lab ...

''IBMJARG'' (1990), a programmable

OS/2 OS/2 is a Proprietary software, proprietary computer operating system for x86 and PowerPC based personal computers. It was created and initially developed jointly by IBM and Microsoft, under the leadership of IBM software designer Ed Iacobucci, ...

world globe ''PMGlobe'' (1993), ''MemoWiki'' based on his ''GoServe''

Gopher Pocket gophers, commonly referred to simply as gophers, are burrowing rodents of the family Geomyidae. The roughly 41 speciesSearch results for "Geomyidae" on thASM Mammal Diversity Database are all endemic to North and Central America. They ar ...

http HTTP (Hypertext Transfer Protocol) is an application layer protocol in the Internet protocol suite model for distributed, collaborative, hypermedia information systems. HTTP is the foundation of data communication for the World Wide Web, wher ...

server, and the

Java Java is one of the Greater Sunda Islands in Indonesia. It is bordered by the Indian Ocean to the south and the Java Sea (a part of Pacific Ocean) to the north. With a population of 156.9 million people (including Madura) in mid 2024, proje ...

-related

NetRexx NetRexx is an open source, originally IBM's, variant of the REXX programming language to run on the Java virtual machine. It supports a classic REXX syntax, with no reserved keywords, along with considerable additions to support object-oriented pr ...

programming language (1997). He has contributed to various computing standards, including

ISO The International Organization for Standardization (ISO ; ; ) is an independent, non-governmental, international standard development organization composed of representatives from the national standards organizations of member countries. Me ...

(

COBOL COBOL (; an acronym for "common business-oriented language") is a compiled English-like computer programming language designed for business use. It is an imperative, procedural, and, since 2002, object-oriented language. COBOL is primarily ...

, C, C++), BSI (SGML, C),

ANSI The American National Standards Institute (ANSI ) is a private nonprofit organization that oversees the development of voluntary consensus standards for products, services, processes, systems, and personnel in the United States. The organiz ...

(REXX),

IETF The Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF) is a standards organization for the Internet standard, Internet and is responsible for the technical standards that make up the Internet protocol suite (TCP/IP). It has no formal membership roster ...

(

HTTP HTTP (Hypertext Transfer Protocol) is an application layer protocol in the Internet protocol suite model for distributed, collaborative, hypermedia information systems. HTTP is the foundation of data communication for the World Wide Web, wher ...

1.0/RFC 1945),

W3C The World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) is the main international standards organization for the World Wide Web. Founded in 1994 by Tim Berners-Lee, the consortium is made up of member organizations that maintain full-time staff working together in ...

(

XML Schema An XML schema is a description of a type of XML document, typically expressed in terms of constraints on the structure and content of documents of that type, above and beyond the basic syntactical constraints imposed by XML itself. These constrai ...

), ECMA (

JavaScript JavaScript (), often abbreviated as JS, is a programming language and core technology of the World Wide Web, alongside HTML and CSS. Ninety-nine percent of websites use JavaScript on the client side for webpage behavior. Web browsers have ...

ECMAScript ECMAScript (; ES) is a standard for scripting languages, including JavaScript, JScript, and ActionScript. It is best known as a JavaScript standard intended to ensure the interoperability of web pages across different web browsers. It is stan ...

, C#,

CLI CLI may refer to: Computing * Call Level Interface, an SQL database management API * Command-line interface, of a computer program * Command-line interpreter or command language interpreter; see List of command-line interpreters * CLI (x86 instruc ...

), and

IEEE The Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE) is an American 501(c)(3) organization, 501(c)(3) public charity professional organization for electrical engineering, electronics engineering, and other related disciplines. The IEEE ...

( 754 decimal floating-point). He retired from IBM in March 2010.

Decimal arithmetic

Cowlishaw has worked on aspects of

decimal The decimal numeral system (also called the base-ten positional numeral system and denary or decanary) is the standard system for denoting integer and non-integer numbers. It is the extension to non-integer numbers (''decimal fractions'') of th ...

arithmetic; his proposal for an improved Java BigDecimal class ( JSR 13) is now included in Java 5.0, and in 2002, he invented a refinement of Chen–Ho encoding known as densely packed decimal encoding. Cowlishaw's decimal arithmetic specification formed the proposal for the decimal parts of the IEEE 754 standard, as well as being followed by many implementations, such as Python and

SAP NetWeaver SAP NetWeaver is a software stack for many of SAP SE's applications. The SAP NetWeaver Application Server, sometimes referred to as WebAS, is the runtime environment for the SAP applications and all of the mySAP Business Suite runs on SAP WebA ...

. His decNumber decimal package is also available as open source under several licenses and is now part of GCC, and his proposals for decimal hardware have been adopted by IBM and others. They are integrated into the IBM POWER6 and

IBM System z10 IBM System z10 is a line of IBM Mainframe computer, mainframes. The z10 Enterprise Class (EC) was announced on February 26, 2008. On October 21, 2008, IBM announced the z10 Business Class (BC), a scaled-down version of the z10 EC. The System ...

processor cores, and in numerous IBM software products such as DB2, TPF (in

Sabre A sabre or saber ( ) is a type of backsword with a curved blade associated with the light cavalry of the Early Modern warfare, early modern and Napoleonic period, Napoleonic periods. Originally associated with Central European cavalry such a ...

WebSphere MQ IBM MQ is a family of message-oriented middleware products that IBM launched in December 1993. It was originally called MQSeries, and was renamed ''WebSphere MQ'' in 2002 to join the suite of WebSphere products. In April 2014, it was renamed ''IBM ...

, operating systems, and C and PL/I compilers.

Other activities

Cowlishaw wrote an emulator for the Acorn System 1, and collected related documentation. Outside computing, he caved in the UK, New England, Spain, and Mexico and continues to cave and hike in Spain. He is a life member of the National Speleological Society (NSS), wrote articles in the 1970s and 1980s on battery technology and on the shock strength of caving ropes, and designed

LED A light-emitting diode (LED) is a semiconductor device that emits light when current flows through it. Electrons in the semiconductor recombine with electron holes, releasing energy in the form of photons. The color of the light (corresp ...

-based caving lamps. His current programming projects include MapGazer. and PanGazer

Publications (primary author)

* ''The NetRexx Language'', Cowlishaw, Michael F., , Prentice-Hall, 1997 * ''The REXX Language'', Cowlishaw, Michael F., in English: , (second edition) 1990; in German: , Carl Hanser Verlag, 1988; in Japanese: , Kindai-kagaku-sha, 1988 * , Cowlishaw, Michael F., ''Proceedings 16th IEEE Symposium on Computer Arithmetic''
ARITH 16
, , pp. 104–111, IEEE Comp. Society, June 2003
Densely Packed Decimal Encoding
Cowlishaw, Michael F.,
''IEE Proceedings – Computers and Digital Techniques'' ISSN 1350-2387, Vol. 149, No. 3, pp. 102–104, IEE, May 2002
A Decimal Floating-Point Specification
Cowlishaw, Schwarz, Smith, and Webb, ''Proceedings 15th IEEE Symposium on Computer Arithmetic'' (Arith15), , pp. 147–154, IEEE Comp. Society, June 2001 * , Cowlishaw, Michael F., ''Proceedings of IEEE CompCon 97'', , pp. 200–205, IEEE Press, Los Alamitos, Spring 1997
The Early History of REXX
Cowlishaw, Michael F., ''IEEE Annals of the History of Computing'', ISSN 1058-6180, Vol. 16, No. 4, Winter 1994, pp. 15–24
A large-scale computer conferencing system
Chess and Cowlishaw, ''IBM Systems Journal'', Vol. 26, No. 1, 1987, IBM Reprint order number G321-5291
LEXX – A programmable structured editor
Cowlishaw, Michael F., ''IBM Journal of Research and Development'', Vol. 31, No. 1, 1987, IBM Reprint order number G322-0151
Fundamental requirements for picture presentation
Cowlishaw, Michael F., ''Proceedings Society for Information Display'', Volume 26, No. 2 (1985)
The design of the REXX language
Cowlishaw, Michael F., ''IBM Systems Journal'', Volume 23, No. 4, 1984, IBM Reprint order number G321-5228
The Characteristics and Use of Lead-Acid Cap Lamps
Cowlishaw, Michael F.
Speleogroup
, ''Transactions British Cave Research Association'', Volume 1, No. 4, pp. 199–214, December 1974

References

{{DEFAULTSORT:Cowlishaw, Mike Living people British computer scientists Fellows of the Royal Academy of Engineering IBM Fellows Programming language designers Free software programmers Rexx British cavers Fellows of the British Computer Society Fellows of the Institution of Engineering and Technology Academics of the University of Warwick Alumni of the University of Birmingham People educated at Monkton Combe School Year of birth missing (living people)