Mike Cowlishaw

Michael F. Cowlishaw
Born	Bath, England
Nationality	British
Fields	Computer Science
Institutions	University of Warwick
Alma mater	University of Birmingham
Known for	Rexx, editors (STET, LEXX), Decimal arithmetic, DPD
Notable awards	FReng, FIET, FBCS

Mike F. 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. 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.

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 (1985), the STET folding editor (1977), the LEXX live parsing editor with colour highlighting for the Oxford English Dictionary (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 server, and the Java-related NetRexx programming language (1997).

He has contributed to and/or edited various computing standards, including ISO (SGML, COBOL, C, C++), BSI (SGML, C), ANSI (REXX), IETF (HTTP 1.0/RFC 1945), W3C (XML Schema), ECMA (JavaScript/ECMAScript, C#, CLI), and IEEE (754 decimal floating-point). He retired from IBM in March 2010.

Decimal arithmetic

Cowlishaw has worked on aspects of decimal 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 processor cores, and in numerous IBM software products such as DB2, TPF (in Sabre), WebSphere MQ, 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. 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-based caving lamps.

Publications

• The NetRexx Language, Cowlishaw, M. F., ISBN 0-13-806332-X, Prentice-Hall, 1997
• The REXX Language, Cowlishaw, M. F., in English: ISBN 0-13-780651-5, (second edition) 1990; in German: ISBN 3-446-15195-8, Carl Hanser Verlag, 1988; in Japanese: ISBN 4-7649-0136-6, Kindai-kagaku-sha, 1988
• Decimal Floating-Point: Algorism for Computers, Cowlishaw, M. F., Proceedings 16th IEEE Symposium on Computer Arithmetic (Arith16), ISBN 0-7695-1894-X, pp104–111, IEEE Comp. Soc., June 2003
• Densely Packed Decimal Encoding, Cowlishaw, M. F., (Summary.) IEE Proceedings – Computers and Digital Techniques ISSN 1350-2387, Vol. 149, No. 3, pp102–104, IEE, May 2002
• A Decimal Floating-Point Specification, Cowlishaw, Schwarz, Smith, and Webb, Proceedings 15th IEEE Symposium on Computer Arithmetic (Arith15), ISBN 0-7695-1150-3, pp147–154, IEEE Comp. Soc., June 2001
• NetRexx – an alternative for writing Java classes, Cowlishaw, M. F., Proceedings of IEEE CompCon 97, ISBN 0-8186-7804-6, pp200–205, IEEE Press, Los Alamitos, Spring 1997
• The Early History of REXX, Cowlishaw, M. F., IEEE Annals of the History of Computing, ISSN 1058-6180, Vol 16, No. 4, Winter 1994, pp15–24
• 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, M. F., IBM Journal of Research and Development, Vol 31, No. 1, 1987, IBM Reprint order number G322-0151
• Fundamental requirements for picture presentation, Cowlishaw, M. F., Proc. Society for Information Display, Volume 26, No. 2 (1985)
• The design of the REXX language, Cowlishaw, M. 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, M. F. (Speleogroup), Trans. British Cave Research Association, Vol 1, No. 4, pp199–214, December 1974