In Memoriam

Mark Crispin, best known as the father of the Internet Message Access Protocol (IMAP), was an expert in email and developed other mail systems. For many years he was a contributor to architectural aspects of the Unicode Standard, and a long-term member of the Consortium. Also, see the Wikipedia page on Mark.

Magda Danish joined the Unicode Consortium in April 1999 and managed the Unicode office until December 2011, as Senior Administrative Director. She handled all aspects of office work including administration, bookkeeping, meeting coordination, website maintenance, membership relations, and customer support. When needed, she loved to lend a helping hand to the often overworked Unicode editorial committee. She made important contributions to development of UCD property data. For several years she helped with the very large task of proofing tens of thousands of Unihan pinyin readings.

Magda graduated from the "Université de Paris VII - Jussieu" in Paris with a degree in computer science (Maîtrise d' Informatique). She was born in Cairo, Egypt and spoke Arabic and French fluently.

James Do (Đỗ Bá Phước) was active from the the early days of Unicode when he worked to shape the encoding of both the Latin-based Quốc ngữ script now used in Vietnam, as well as the traditional Hán (Literary Chinese) and Chữ Nôm. He brought together Vietnamese experts in Hán and Chữ Nôm to facilitate Vietnamese participation in the IRG. He worked tirelessly in Vietnam and overseas to promote the adoption of Unicode. He co-founded the Vietnamese Nôm Preservation Foundation as part of his long-term interest in making the largely untranslated corpus of traditional Vietnamese literature in Hán and Nôm, and the cultural legacy it contains, available to students around the world in digital form. James was also interested in the sustainable development of Vietnam through improved education, to which end he helped found the Pacific Links Foundation. James moved from California back to Vietnam in 2007 to work as CTO of InfoNam Inc. until his passing on January 10, 2015.

See: http://www.diendan.org/nhung-con-nguoi/do-ba-phuoc-1952-2015

Bill English was one of the founding participants in the Unicode project. He brought Sun Microsystems in as one of the initial members of the Unicode Consortium and served as the consortium's first treasurer, from 1991 to 1996.

Bill Hall was a developer and consultant on Windows and .NET platforms with experience going back to Windows 1.0, which he ported at the systems level to AT&T/Olivetti computers. An applications programmer throughout his computing career, he turned to internationalization in the early 1990s, taking several projects into European and Far East languages and contributing numerous articles to Microsoft Systems Journal and Multilingual Computing.

A long-term member of the Consortium, Bill was known to many people through his lectures and tutorials on Unicode and Internationalization, with a focus on Windows applications. For many years, Bill was a regular contributor of tutorials and talks at the Internationalization and Unicode conferences. He also developed curriculum for teaching internationalization at local colleges. Bill never passed up a chance to teach, and always taught with patience and persistence.

Earlier in his life, Bill was a military and civilian aviator, an associate professor of mathematics for nearly 20 years, and served three years as an associate editor at Mathematical Reviews. Also, see his obituary.

Hideki Hiura was long-known as an internationalization architect at Sun Microsystems, Inc. He was a founder and chairperson of the Linux Internationalization Initiative, the OpenI18N.org/Free Standards Group. He was also a founding member of W3C I18N Working Group. He became the CTO and Chief Scientist of JustSystems North America, Inc.

During his long career in internationalization, Hideki was involved with variety of standards and standard organizations including ISO, W3C, OMG, The Open Group, OSF, Unix International, X Consortium and Unicode. As one of the earliest members of the Unicode Technical Committee, he contributed to the development of several versions of the Unicode Standard as the primary representative of Sun Microsystems, Inc. With his East Asian expertise, he was a major contributor to the standardization of Variation Selectors and the Ideographic Variation Database. Also, see this tribute.

Lloyd loved working with computers and earned a degree in Computer Science from Brigham Young University. For 13 years, he worked for Novell as the lead architect of the International Product Development Group. In 1996 he was "loaned" to Sun Microsystem's Javasoft division and co-authored the character conversion classes for JDK 1.1. He then became a Senior Internationalization Engineer for Lionbridge. Lloyd also worked as a Senior Internationalization Engineer for International Communications, based in Boulder, Colorado.

Lloyd was involved with the Unicode Consortium starting in 1990, including serving as Novell's representative to the Unicode Technical Committee from 1991-1999, chairing the Unicode conference committee for the first Unicode Conference in Tokyo in 1994, and serving on the conference review board for a number of years. Also, see his obituary.

Please see the Remembering John H. Jenkins on the Unicode Blog for memorial information and a link to John's obituary.

John Jenkins was a Senior Software Engineer at Apple where his main responsibilities were to maintain and extend Apple’s fonts and font development tools. John was involved in standardization for over three decades. He had a particular focus on the standardization of Han ideographs, and served as the Unicode Consortium’s liaison to the Ideographic Research Group (IRG) and as the Vice-Chair of the Unicode CJK & Unihan Group.

As a software engineer at Microsoft, Michael was a long-time devoted contributor to the Unicode effort. He was a regular speaker at the Internationalization and Unicode Conferences where he often gave two or three presentations annually, sometimes on short notice. Over two decades, he contributed significantly to discussions on mailing lists, and through his widely-read blog Sorting it All Out. He had a lively interest in Tamil language support and was a liaison representative from the Unicode Consortium to INFITT for some years. Michael was the 2008 recipient of the Unicode Bulldog Award. Also, see his obituary.

Julia Oesterle was Administrative Director for the Unicode Consortium from 1997-1999. Prior to joining the consortium, she worked variously in news photography, as an adjunct professor, social services administrator, and web designer. She had a BS in Sociology, Purdue University; ABD and MS in Anthropology, Purdue University; MFA in Photography, Ohio University. She died August 16th, 2001, in Santa Clara, CA.

Memorial page at West Lafayette High School

Toshihiro ("Linus") Tanaka contributed to software technology and internationalization for more than 30 years. Educated in Japan, Linus moved to the US and worked for many years at Oracle in roles in both the Oracle Database and Tools divisions. After his work at Oracle, he continued to contribute to localization and internationalization including stints at Yahoo! and, most recently, Amazon.

Linus championed Unicode and particularly four-byte forms of Unicode encodings. For many years, Linus was a regular participant at Unicode Technical Committee meetings, as well as a regular Unicode Conference presenter, where his insights contributed to Unicode's ongoing work. Also, see his obituary.

Over a career of nearly 40 years in the translation industry, Merle Tenney led product design and managed teams creating dictionary, grammar, style checking, and other linguistic tools, as well as guiding and evangelizing internationalization for several companies, including Claris and Apple. Merle also was a program manager for Natural Language Processing at Microsoft. Ultimately, Merle chose to become an industry consultant and provided numerous companies with internationalization and localization leadership and strategies, contributing to state of the art technologies such as machine translation, voice recognition, and linguistic quality evaluation. Merle was well-known for his broad smile and frequent attendance and commentary at Bay Area IMUG events, and at various industry conferences, including the annual Unicode conferences. Merle was very active and passionate working with a committee to develop a new model and potential standard for evaluating translations and rating for quality. His goal was having a reliable way to measure language quality and improve machine translation and more generally language content. He gave a talk about this new ATSM standard for translation quality evaluation at a 2019 IMUG meeting. It is available on YouTube. Also, see his obituary.

Van was one of the earliest, and perhaps the most passionate, advocates for the establishment of Unicode within IBM. Van was the first representative when IBM became a Full Member in June 1990. In August 1991, he organized the IBM hosting of the first Unicode Workshop, a 2-day event that grew into the annual Unicode Conferences. A COBOL expert, Van led IBM's efforts to standardize Object-Oriented COBOL, and always focused on robust Unicode support in IBM products.