Bourne

Stephen Richard (Steve) Bourne (born 7 January 1944) is a computer scientist, originally from the United Kingdom and based in the United States for most of his career. He is most famous as the author of the Bourne shell (sh), which is the foundation for the standard command line interfaces to Unix. Bourne has a Bachelor’s degree in mathematics from King’s College London, England. He has a Diploma in Computer Science and a Ph.D. in mathematics from Trinity College, Cambridge. Subsequently he worked on an ALGOL 68 compiler at the University of Cambridge Computer Laboratory (see ALGOL 68C). After Cambridge, Bourne spent nine years at Bell Labs with the Seventh Edition Unix team. As well as the Bourne shell, he wrote the adb debugger 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, Digital Equipment Corporation, Sun Microsystems and Cisco Systems. From 2000 to 2002 he was President of the Association for Computing Machinery. For his work on computing, Bourne was award the ACM’s Presidential Award in 2008 and was made a Fellow of the organization in 2005. He is also a Fellow of the Royal Astronomical Society. Bourne is chief technology officer at Icon 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 helped found when he was President of the ACM.