Mike Cowlishaw is a visiting professor at the Department of Computer Science at the

University of Warwick , mottoeng = Mind moves matter , established = , type = Public research university , endowment = £7.0 million (2021) , budget = £698.2 million (2020 ...

, and a Fellow of the Royal Academy of Engineering. He is a retired IBM Fellow, and was a Fellow of the Institute of Engineering and Technology, and the British Computer Society. He was educated at Monkton Combe School and the

University of Birmingham , mottoeng = Through efforts to heights , established = 1825 – Birmingham School of Medicine and Surgery1836 – Birmingham Royal School of Medicine and Surgery1843 – Queen's College1875 – Mason Science College1898 – Mason Univers ...

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 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 tex ...

(1977), the LEXX live parsing editor with colour highlighting for the

Oxford English Dictionary The ''Oxford English Dictionary'' (''OED'') is the first and foundational historical dictionary of the English language, published by Oxford University Press (OUP). It traces the historical development of the English language, providing a c ...

(1985), electronic publishing, SGML applications, the IBM Jargon File ''IBMJARG'' (1990), a programmable OS/2 world globe ''PMGlobe'' (1993), ''MemoWiki'' based on his ''GoServe'' Gopher/

http The Hypertext Transfer Protocol (HTTP) 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 We ...

server, and the

Java Java (; id, Jawa, ; jv, ꦗꦮ; su, ) is one of the Greater Sunda Islands in Indonesia. It is bordered by the Indian Ocean to the south and the Java Sea to the north. With a population of 151.6 million people, Java is the world's mo ...

-related NetRexx programming language (1997). He has contributed to various computing standards, including ISO ( SGML, COBOL, C, C++), BSI (SGML, C), ANSI (REXX),

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

(

HTTP The Hypertext Transfer Protocol (HTTP) 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 We ...

1.0/RFC 1945), W3C ( XML Schema), ECMA (

JavaScript JavaScript (), often abbreviated as JS, is a programming language that is one of the core technologies of the World Wide Web, alongside HTML and CSS. As of 2022, 98% of websites use JavaScript on the client side for webpage behavior, of ...

ECMAScript ECMAScript (; ES) is a JavaScript standard intended to ensure the interoperability of web pages across different browsers. It is standardized by Ecma International in the documenECMA-262 ECMAScript is commonly used for client-side scripti ...

, 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 instr ...

), and

IEEE The Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE) is a 501(c)(3) professional association for electronic engineering and electrical engineering (and associated disciplines) with its corporate office in New York City and its operati ...

( 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 Chen–Ho encoding is a memory-efficient alternate system of binary encoding for decimal digits. The traditional system of binary encoding for decimal digits, known as binary-coded decimal (BCD), uses four bits to encode each digit, resulting in ...

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

Sabre A sabre (French: �sabʁ or saber in American English) is a type of backsword with a curved blade associated with the light cavalry of the early modern and Napoleonic periods. Originally associated with Central European cavalry such as t ...

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 ''IB ...

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

Other activities

Cowlishaw wrote an emulator for the

Acorn System 1 The Acorn System 1, initially called the Acorn Microcomputer (Micro-Computer), was an early 8-bit microcomputer for hobbyists, based on the MOS 6502 CPU, and produced by British company Acorn Computers from 1979. The main parts of the system we ...

, 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 The National Speleological Society (NSS) is an organization formed in 1941 to advance the exploration, conservation, study, and understanding of caves in the United States. Originally headquartered in Washington D.C., its current offices are in ...

(NSS), wrote articles in the 1970s and 1980s on battery technology and on the shock strength of caving ropes, and designed LED-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)