Mr. Jean David Ichbiah

A French-born computer scientist and the chief designer (from 1977?1983) of Ada, a general-purpose, strongly typed programming language with certified validated compilers. At the time, he was a member of the Programming Research division at CII Honeywell Bull (CII-HB) in Louveciennes, France. He had previously designed an experimental system implementation language called LIS (1972?1974), based on Pascal and Simula (in fact, he had been chairman of the Simula User's Group), and was one of the founding members of IFIP WG 2.4 on Systems Implementation Languages. His team submitted the language design called "Green" to the competition to choose the United States Department of Defense's embedded programming language. When Green was selected in 1978, he continued as chief designer of the language, renamed "Ada". In 1980, he left CII-HB and founded the Alsys Corporation in La Celle-Saint-Cloud, which continued language definition to standardize Ada 83, and later went into the Ada compiler business, also supplying special validated compiler systems to NASA, the US Army, and others. He later moved to the Waltham, Massachusetts subsidiary of Alsys. He designed the keyboard layout FITALY which is specifically optimized for stylus or touch-based input, and subsequently started the Textware company, which sells text entry software for PDAs and tablet PCs, as well as text-entry software for medical transcription on PCs. In 1979, he was designated a "chevalier" (knight) of the French Legion of Honor and a "correspondent" of the French Academy of Sciences. He received a Certificate of Distinguished Service from the DoD for his work on Ada.