Dr Abera Molla

Dr. Aberra Molla is the pioneer who computerized the Ethiopian alphabet having recognized the power of computers and their potential. He collaborated with his own son to make one set of screen and printer fonts for the ancient Ethiopian script of Geez in 1986, which subsequently gave birth to the first Ethiopian word processor.  Dr. Aberra’s innovative Amharic Microsoft Disk Operating System or DOS quickly gained recognition as a definitive work that moved the Ethiopian alphabet from the printing press to computers for the first time.

Dr. Aberra Molla was introduced to computers in 1976 when he was a post–doctoral Clinical Science student at Colorado State University.  In 1990 he succeeded in having Amharic recognised by Unicode – a computing industry standard for the consistent encoding, representation and handling of text expressed in most of the world’s writing systems..

Among examples of his accomplishments are pending patents and recognition in 1990 by the Ethiopian Research Council for computerizing Amharic and revolutionizing the Geez script.  A prolific writer, an inventor, a scientist and a father of three engineers, Dr. Aberra is also deservingly credited with being the father of Ethiopic. 

His successful innovative work has meant that Ethiopians can now communicate in their national language of Amharic on computer devices.