Mike Cowlishaw

Mike Cowlishaw, whose full name is Michael Frederic Cowlishaw, is a British computer scientist, a retired IBM Fellow and a Fellow of the Royal Academy of Engineering. He was a Fellow of the Institute of Engineering and Technology and of the British Computer Society, and has been a visiting professor in the Department of Computer Science at the University of Warwick. Born in Bath, England, he was educated at Monkton Combe School and the University of Birmingham, and joined IBM in 1974 as an electronic engineer. He is best known for designing and implementing the Rexx programming language in 1984. His other work at IBM includes the STET folding editor of 1977, the LEXX live parsing editor with colour highlighting that was written for the Oxford English Dictionary in 1985, the TOOLSRUN and TOOLS packages used to create the IBMPC Conferencing Disk, work on colour perception and image processing, electronic publishing, SGML applications and the IBM Jargon File. He is also known for work on decimal arithmetic and the densely packed decimal encoding.