Meetings and Events
Notice: special meeting, not regular date
- my history and background
- how and why we had to re write the shell
- why I wrote my own memory management
- key language design decisions
- where those ideas came from
- what was hard to get right
- system changes we made to accommodate sh
- what the rules were in UNIX group
- what would I do differently today
Steve Bourne is computer scientist who is internationally known for his work on the UNIX operating system. While at Bell Laboratories, Steve designed the UNIX Command Language known as the "Bourne Shell". It is the standard command line interface to UNIX and is widely used today in scripting in the UNIX programming environment.
Steve has a Bachelor's degree in mathematics from King's College London, England. He has a Diploma (or Master's degree) in Computer Science and a Ph.D. in mathematics from Trinity College, Cambridge. While at the University of Cambridge Computer Laboratory he worked on an ALGOL 68 compiler and CAMAL an early algebra system.
After Cambridge, Steve spent nine years at Bell Labs with the Seventh Edition Unix team. As well as the Bourne shell, he wrote the adb debugger and published /The UNIX System/, the second book on the UNIX system, intended for a general readership. This book is recognized as a text for the effective use of UNIX.
After Bell Labs, he spent 20 years in senior engineering management positions. At Cisco Systems, he was director of engineering for enterprise network management; at Sun Microsystems, he managed the Solaris 2.0 program; at Digital Equipment Corporation, he developed DEC's first RISC-based workstation; and at Silicon Graphics, he was Director of Software Engineering responsible for the introduction of the IRIS, the company's first graphics workstation.
From 2000 to 2002 he was President of the Association for Computing Machinery. For his work on computing he was made a Fellow of the ACM in 2005. He is also a Fellow of the Royal Astronomical Society.
At present Steve is chief technology officer at Rally Venture Partners, a Menlo Park-based venture capital group in California. He is also the chair of the Editorial Advisory Board for /ACM Queue/, a magazine he started when he was President of the ACM.