Mike Cowlishaw is a visiting professor at the Department of Computer Science at the University of Warwick, and 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 senior ...

. He is a retired IBM Fellow, and was a Fellow of the Institute of Engineering and Technology, and the

British Computer Society Sir Maurice Wilkes served as the first President of BCS in 1957 BCS, The Chartered Institute for IT, known as the British Computer Society until 2009, is a professional body and a learned society that represents those working in infor ...

. He was educated at

Monkton Combe School (Thy Word is Truth) , established = , type = Public schoolIndependent schoolBoarding school , founder = The Revd Francis Pocock , head_label = Head Master , head ...

and the University of Birmingham.

Career at IBM

Cowlishaw 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 programming language that can be interpreted or compiled. It was developed at IBM by Mike Cowlishaw. It is a structured, high-level programming language designed for ease of learning and reading. ...

programming language (1984), his work on colour perception and image processing that led to the formation of

JPEG JPEG ( ) is a commonly used method of lossy compression for digital images, particularly for those images produced by digital photography. The degree of compression can be adjusted, allowing a selectable tradeoff between storage size and imag ...

(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 live parsing editor with colour highlighting for the Oxford English Dictionary (1985), electronic publishing,

SGML The Standard Generalized Markup Language (SGML; 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 two postulates": * Declarative: Markup should des ...

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 AI Lab, the Stanford AI Lab (SAIL) and others of the old ARPANET A ...

''IBMJARG'' (1990), a programmable OS/2 world globe ''PMGlobe'' (1993), ''MemoWiki'' based on his ''GoServe'' Gopher/ http server, and the Java-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 ...

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

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 us ...

, C, C++), BSI (SGML, C), ANSI (REXX), IETF ( HTTP 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 and led by Tim Berners-Lee, the consortium is made up of member organizations that maintain full-time staff working to ...

( XML Schema),

ECMA Ecma International () is a nonprofit standards organization for information and communication systems. It acquired its current name in 1994, when the European Computer Manufacturers Association (ECMA) changed its name to reflect the organizatio ...

( JavaScript/ ECMAScript, 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 ( 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 of the Hindu–Arabic numeral ...

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. 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 TPF may refer to: * Tibial plateau fracture * Theodore Payne Foundation for Wild Flowers and Native Plants * Transaction Processing Facility, an operating system by IBM * Terrestrial Planet Finder, a proposed system of telescopes to detect extrasola ...

(in Sabre),

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 Electronics, device that Light#Light sources, emits light when Electric current, current flows through it. Electrons in the semiconductor recombine with electron holes, releasing energy i ...

-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 The IEEE International Symposium on Computer Arithmetic (ARITH) is a conference in the area of computer arithmetic. The symposium was established in 1969, initially as three-year event, then as a biennial event, and, finally, from 2015 as an annu ...

''
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)