Jean Ichbiah

Ichbiah was a descendant of Greek and Turkish Jews from Thessaloniki who emigrated to France.

In 1980, Ichbiah founded the software development company Alsys, created to support initial work on the Ada programming language. In July 1995, Alsys merged to become Thomson Software Products (TSP), which itself would subsequently merge into Aonix in 1996. From 1972 to 1974, Ichbiah worked on designing an experimental system implementation language called LIS, based on Pascal and Simula. 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.

Ichbiah then joined CII Honeywell Bull (CII-HB) in Louveciennes, France, becoming a member of the Programming Research division. Among other projects, he worked on the rewrite of the Siris 7 operating system into Siris 8,Mainframe computer CII Iris 80 developed by the French company CII.

Ichbiah's team submitted a language design labelled "Green" to a 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, now named "Ada". In 1980, Ichbiah 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.

In the 1990s, Ichbiah designed the keyboard layout FITALY, which is specifically optimized for stylus or touch-based input. Subsequently, he started the Textware Solutions company, which sells text entry software for PDAs and tablet PCs, as well as text-entry software for medical transcription on PCs.