Mike Cowlishaw

Mike Cowlishaw is an IBM Fellow based at IBM UK’s Warwick location, a Visiting Professor at the Department of Computer Science at the University of Warwick, and an elected Fellow of the Royal Academy of Engineering (roughly the equivalent of the NAE in the USA).

Cowlishaw joined IBM in 1974 as an electronic engineer but is best known as a programmer. He is known for designing and implementing the REXX and NetRexx programming languages, and for his work on color perception, the LEXX editor for the Oxford English Dictionary, electronic publishing, Java-related languages, and decimal arithmetic.

Ouside computing, he also is known as a caver, a life member of the NSS, he wrote classic articles in the 1970s and 1980s on battery technology and on the shock strength of caving ropes and caved in New England, Spain, and Mexico.