Mike Cowlishaw

mfc@vnet.ibm.com

I'm Mike Cowlishaw, an IBM Fellow working at the IBM UK Laboratories at Hursley, near Winchester, in England.

My technical interests include

• The Rexx programming language
• Electronic publishing (including the World-Wide Web and my "GoServe" Web server for OS/2)
• Lightweight (preferably solid-state) computers
• Vision and colour perception
• Neural Networks and evolutionary systems

Address:

M. F. Cowlishaw
IBM Fellow
IBM UK Laboratories Ltd.
Hursley Park
Winchester  SO21 2JN.  UK. 

Telephone:

+44-1962-815349
(via IBM operator: +44-1962-815000  Ext. 245349)

Some selected publications

• The design of the REXX language
  IBM Systems Journal, Volume 23, No. 4 (1984).
  IBM Reprint order number G321-5228
• Fundamental requirements for picture presentation
  Proc. Society for Information Display, Volume 26, No. 2 (1985).
• LEXX -- A programmable structured editor
  IBM Journal of Research and Development, Vol 31, No. 1, 1987
  IBM Reprint order number G322-0151
• A large-scale computer conferencing system (Chess & Cowlishaw)
  IBM Systems Journal, Vol 26, No. 1, 1987
  IBM Reprint order number G321-5291
• The Early History of REXX
  IEEE Annals of the History of Computing (ISSN 1058-6180)
  Vol 16, No. 4, Winter 1994, pp15-24
• The REXX Language

   In English:   ISBN 0-13-780735-X   Prentice-Hall, 1985
                 ISBN 0-13-780651-5     (Second edition), 1990
   In German:    ISBN 3-446-15195-8   Carl Hanser Verlag, 1988
                 ISBN 0-13-780784-8   P-H International, 1988
   In Japanese:  ISBN 4-7649-0136-6   Kindai-kagaku-sha, 1988
  

And here are some more formal biographical notes:

Mike Cowlishaw C.Eng, MBCS, B.Sc

Mike Cowlishaw joined IBM's UK Laboratory at Hursley in 1974, with a B.Sc. in Electronic Engineering from the University of Birmingham. Until 1980, he worked on the design of the hardware and software of display test equipment. Any spare time was spent exploring the human-machine interface, including implementation of the STET Structured Editing Tool (an editor which gives a tree-like structure to programs or documentation), several compilers and assemblers, and the Rexx programming language.

In 1980 Mike was assigned to the IBM T.J.Watson Research Center, at Yorktown Heights, to work on a text display with real-time formatting. In 1982 he moved to the IBM UK Scientific Centre in Winchester, England, to work on colour perception and the modelling of brain mechanisms (along with TOOLS - a large-scale conferencing and software distribution system). In 1985 he was seconded to the Oxford University Press to write an editor (LEXX) for the New Oxford English Dictionary project - this is now an IBM product, running on VM/CMS, OS/2, and AIX. From 1986 to 1990 he worked in the IBM UK Laboratories Systems Technology Group on electronic publishing and Rexx.

Mike was appointed to the IBM Academy of Technology in 1989, and was elected to its Technology Council from 1989 to 1993. He has received a number of IBM awards, including several Outstanding Technical Achievement awards, and, in 1988, a Corporate Award for Outstanding Technical Innovation for his creation and development of Rexx.

Mike was named an IBM Fellow in 1990. His current technical interests (in addition, of course, to Rexx) include user interfaces, electronic publishing, and Neural Networks.