David E. McFarland was a cofounder and vice president of Ryan-McFarland Corporation, a major compiler producer for the computer industry between 1961 and 1988. In 1988, Ryan-McFarland Corporation was sold and is now owned by Liant Software Corporation.

In 1995, Mr. McFarland founded The COBOL Foundation. The COBOL Foundation is dedicated to distributing information on COBOL and COBOL development tools to the world's COBOL application developers. The COBOL Foundation maintains a Web site at http://www.cobol.org providing this information to the world.

In addition, Mr. McFarland is involved at the board level in several start-up companies. Mr. McFarland is also part of a team producing The COBOL Report, a newsletter for the professional COBOL programmer.

Mr. McFarland can be reached at The COBOL Foundation, 75-599 Valle Vista Drive, Indian Wells, CA 92210-7407 (619/773-5741; fax 619/340-0349; Internet: davem@cobol.org).