Wim Ebbinkhuijsen

Wim Ebbinkhuijsen, born December 24, 1939 in Amsterdam, is a retired Dutch computer scientist considered one of the fathers of COBOL. He initiated the International ISO COBOL Working Group in 1979, was a member of the Dutch COBOL Committee from 1967 and its chairman from 1978 to 2003, and served on the NCITS/ANSI COBOL committee X3J4 from 1998 to 2001, designing and rewriting parts of the current COBOL standard. He wrote the first International Standard for the programming language BASIC, left the COBOL world in 2004 after 42 years of commitment, and received an IEEE award and was invested as a Knight of the Order of Orange-Nassau for his contribution to COBOL.