Steve Bourne is a computer scientist, originally from the United Kingdom

United Kingdom

The United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern IrelandIn the United Kingdom and Dependencies, other languages have been officially recognised as legitimate autochthonous languages under the European Charter for Regional or Minority Languages...

 and based in the US for most of his career. He is most famous as the author of the Bourne shell

Bourne shell

The Bourne shell, or sh, was the default Unix shell of Unix Version 7 and most Unix-like systems continue to have /bin/sh - which will be the Bourne shell, or a symbolic link or hard link to a compatible shell - even when more modern shells are used by most users.Developed by Stephen Bourne at AT&T...

 (sh), which is the foundation for the standard command line interfaces to Unix

Unix

Unix is a multitasking, multi-user computer operating system originally developed in 1969 by a group of AT&T employees at Bell Labs, including Ken Thompson, Dennis Ritchie, Brian Kernighan, Douglas McIlroy, and Joe Ossanna...

.

Bourne has a Bachelor's degree in mathematics

Mathematics

Mathematics is the study of quantity, space, structure, and change. Mathematicians seek out patterns and formulate new conjectures. Mathematicians resolve the truth or falsity of conjectures by mathematical proofs, which are arguments sufficient to convince other mathematicians of their validity...

 from King's College London

King's College London

King's College London is a public research university located in London, United Kingdom and a constituent college of the federal University of London. King's has a claim to being the third oldest university in England, having been founded by King George IV and the Duke of Wellington in 1829, and...

, England

England

England is a country that is part of the United Kingdom. It shares land borders with Scotland to the north and Wales to the west; the Irish Sea is to the north west, the Celtic Sea to the south west, with the North Sea to the east and the English Channel to the south separating it from continental...

. He has a Diploma in Computer Science and a Ph.D. in mathematics from Trinity College, Cambridge

Trinity College, Cambridge

Trinity College is a constituent college of the University of Cambridge. Trinity has more members than any other college in Cambridge or Oxford, with around 700 undergraduates, 430 graduates, and over 170 Fellows...

. Subsequently he worked on an ALGOL 68

ALGOL 68

ALGOL 68 isan imperative computerprogramming language that was conceived as a successor to theALGOL 60 programming language, designed with the goal of a...

 compiler

Compiler

A compiler is a computer program that transforms source code written in a programming language into another computer language...

 at the University of Cambridge Computer Laboratory

University of Cambridge Computer Laboratory

The Computer Laboratory is the computer science department of the University of Cambridge. As of 2007, it employs 35 academic staff, 25 support staff, 35 affiliated research staff, and about 155 research students...

 (see ALGOL 68C

ALGOL 68C

The ALGOL68C computer programming language compiler was developed for the CHAOS OS for the CAP capability computer at Cambridge University in 1971 by Stephen Bourne and Michael Guy as a dialect of ALGOL 68. Other early contributors were Andrew D. Birrell and Ian Walker.The initial compiler was...

).

After Cambridge

University of Cambridge

The University of Cambridge is a public research university located in Cambridge, United Kingdom. It is the second-oldest university in both the United Kingdom and the English-speaking world , and the seventh-oldest globally...

, Bourne spent nine years at Bell Labs

Bell Labs

Bell Laboratories is the research and development subsidiary of the French-owned Alcatel-Lucent and previously of the American Telephone & Telegraph Company , half-owned through its Western Electric manufacturing subsidiary.Bell Laboratories operates its...

 with the Seventh Edition Unix team. As well as the Bourne shell, he wrote the adb debugger

Debugger

A debugger or debugging tool is a computer program that is used to test and debug other programs . The code to be examined might alternatively be running on an instruction set simulator , a technique that allows great power in its ability to halt when specific conditions are encountered but which...

 and The UNIX System, the second book on the UNIX system, intended for a general readership.

After Bell Labs, Bourne worked in senior engineering management positions at Silicon Graphics

Silicon Graphics

Silicon Graphics, Inc. was a manufacturer of high-performance computing solutions, including computer hardware and software, founded in 1981 by Jim Clark...

, Digital Equipment Corporation

Digital Equipment Corporation

Digital Equipment Corporation was a major American company in the computer industry and a leading vendor of computer systems, software and peripherals from the 1960s to the 1990s...

, Sun Microsystems

Sun Microsystems

Sun Microsystems, Inc. was a company that sold :computers, computer components, :computer software, and :information technology services. Sun was founded on February 24, 1982...

 and Cisco Systems

Cisco Systems

Cisco Systems, Inc. is an American multinational corporation headquartered in San Jose, California, United States, that designs and sells consumer electronics, networking, voice, and communications technology and services. Cisco has more than 70,000 employees and annual revenue of US$...

.

From 2000 to 2002 he was President of the Association for Computing Machinery

Association for Computing Machinery

The Association for Computing Machinery is a learned society for computing. It was founded in 1947 as the world's first scientific and educational computing society. Its membership is more than 92,000 as of 2009...

.

He is presently chief technology officer at El Dorado Ventures, a Menlo Park

Menlo Park, California

Menlo Park, California is a city at the eastern edge of San Mateo County, in the San Francisco Bay Area of California, in the United States. It is bordered by San Francisco Bay on the north and east; East Palo Alto, Palo Alto, and Stanford to the south; Atherton, North Fair Oaks, and Redwood City...

-based venture capital group in California

California

California is a state located on the West Coast of the United States. It is by far the most populous U.S. state, and the third-largest by land area...

. He is also the chair of the Editorial Advisory Board for ACM Queue

ACM Queue

ACM Queue is a computer magazine published by the Association for Computing Machinery . Steve Bourne helped found the magazine when he was President of the ACM and he is now Chair of the Advisory Board. The magazine is produced by computing professionals and is intended for computing professionals...

, a magazine he helped found when he was President of the ACM. Additionally, he is a Fellow of the Association for Computing Machinery and of the Royal Astronomical Society

Royal Astronomical Society

The Royal Astronomical Society is a learned society that began as the Astronomical Society of London in 1820 to support astronomical research . It became the Royal Astronomical Society in 1831 on receiving its Royal Charter from William IV...

.

External links

• Computer Science Colloquium (1994)
• ACM Queue conversation, ACM Queue
  ACM Queue
  ACM Queue is a computer magazine published by the Association for Computing Machinery . Steve Bourne helped found the magazine when he was President of the ACM and he is now Chair of the Advisory Board. The magazine is produced by computing professionals and is intended for computing professionals...
  
  
• Stephen Bourne at LifeWiki
• Steve Bourne at El Dorado Ventures