Stephen R. Bourne
Stephen R. Bourne | |
|---|---|
| Born | Stephen Richard Bourne January 7, 1944 United Kingdom |
| Occupation | Computer scientist |
| Years active | 1960s–2014 |
| Known for | Developing the Bourne shell (sh) |
Stephen Richard "Steve" Bourne (born 7 January 1944) is a British computer scientist who has spent the majority of his professional life working in the United States. He is best known for developing the Bourne shell (sh), a seminal command-line interpreter for Unix systems.
Biography
Bourne earned a Bachelor of Science degree in mathematics from King's College London, followed by a Ph.D. in mathematics at Trinity College, Cambridge, and also holds a Diploma in Computer Science. Early in his career, he was involved in designing an ALGOL 68 compiler and contributed to CAMAL, an algebraic manipulation tool used for lunar theory computations.
During a nine-year tenure at Bell Labs, Bourne was part of the team responsible for the Seventh Edition of Unix. It was there that he created the influential Bourne shell and developed the adb debugger. Additionally, he authored The Unix System, one of the first books about Unix intended for a broader audience.
After leaving Bell Labs, Bourne took on senior engineering management positions at companies including Silicon Graphics, Digital Equipment Corporation, Sun Microsystems, and Cisco Systems. He participated in international programming standards through his involvement with the IFIP Working Group 2.1, which oversees ALGOL 60 and ALGOL 68.
From 2000 to 2002, Bourne held the presidency of the Association for Computing Machinery (ACM). His accolades include being named an ACM Fellow in 2005 and receiving the ACM Presidential Award in 2008. He is also recognized as a Fellow of the Royal Astronomical Society.
Until 2014, Bourne served as Chief Technology Officer at Icon Venture Partners, a venture capital firm based in Menlo Park. He contributed to the editorial board of UNIX Review between 1990 and 1996 and chaired the advisory board of ACM Queue, a publication he helped launch during his term as ACM president.
External links
- Pages with script errors
- Articles with short description
- Articles with hCards
- No local image but image on Wikidata
- Living people
- British computer scientists
- American computer scientists
- Unix people
- Alumni of King's College London
- Alumni of Trinity College, Cambridge
- Members of the University of Cambridge Computer Laboratory
- 2005 fellows of the Association for Computing Machinery
- Presidents of the Association for Computing Machinery
- British expatriate academics in the United States
- Silicon Graphics people
- Digital Equipment Corporation people
- Sun Microsystems people
- Programming language designers
- Computer science writers
- Cellular automatists
- 1944 births
- British chief technology officers