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Bob Bemer
Robert William Bemer (February 8, 1920 – June 22, 2004) was a computer scientist best known for his work at IBM during the late 1950s and early 1960s. Early life and education Born in Sault Ste. Marie, Michigan, Bemer graduated from Cranbrook Kingswood School in 1936 and took a Bachelor of Arts (B.A.) in mathematics at Albion College in 1940. He earned a certificate in aeronautical engineering at Curtiss-Wright Technical Institute in 1941. Career Bemer began his career as an aerodynamicist at Douglas Aircraft Company in 1941, then worked for RAND Corporation from 1951, IBM from 1957, UNIVAC – Sperry Rand in 1965, Bull from 1965, General Electric from 1970, and Honeywell from 1974. He served on the committee which amalgamated the design for his COMTRAN language with Grace Hopper's FLOW-MATIC and thus produced the specifications for COBOL. He also served, with Hugh McGregor Ross and others, on the separate committee which defined the ASCII character c ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Sault Ste
Sault may refer to: Places in Europe * Sault, Vaucluse, France * Saint-Benoît-du-Sault, France * Canton of Sault, France * Canton of Saint-Benoît-du-Sault, France * Sault-Brénaz, France * Sault-de-Navailles, France * Sault-lès-Rethel, France * Sault-Saint-Remy, France Places in North America * Sault Ste. Marie, a cross-border region in Canada and the United States ** Sault Ste. Marie, Ontario, Canada ** Sault Ste. Marie, Michigan, United States * Sault College, Ontario, Canada * Sault Ste. Marie Canal, a National Historic Site of Canada in Sault Ste. Marie, Ontario * Sault Locks or Soo Locks, a set of parallel locks which enable ships to travel between Lake Superior and the lower Great Lakes operated and maintained by the United States Army Corps of Engineers * Long Sault, a rapid in the St. Lawrence River * Long Sault, Ontario, Canada * Sault-au-Récollet, Montreal, Quebec, Canada * Grand Sault or Grand Falls, New Brunswick, Canada People with the surname * Ray S ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Curtiss-Wright Technical Institute
The Curtiss-Wright Technical Institute was an early professional trade school operated by the Curtiss-Wright corporation for aircraft maintenance training. Director Major C. C. Moseley was one of only three school directors selected across America to set the standards for the pre-World War II civilian pilot training program. The institute was first set up in the terminal building of the Grand Central Air Terminal in Glendale, California, expanding to neighboring hangars and buildings around the airport. Both TWA and American Airlines flew transcontinental service from the airport. During World War II, over 7500 mechanics were trained at the facility. In 1950 the institute became part of the Grand Central Aircraft Company and Curtiss-Wright Technical Institute was renamed as the Cal-Aero Technical Institute. The U.S. Air Force used the institute to train mechanics on contract until 1952. Enrollment dropped sharply after the cancellation of the contract and the facility closed in ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Byte
The byte is a unit of digital information that most commonly consists of eight bits. Historically, the byte was the number of bits used to encode a single character of text in a computer and for this reason it is the smallest addressable unit of memory in many computer architectures. To disambiguate arbitrarily sized bytes from the common 8-bit definition, network protocol documents such as The Internet Protocol () refer to an 8-bit byte as an octet. Those bits in an octet are usually counted with numbering from 0 to 7 or 7 to 0 depending on the bit endianness. The first bit is number 0, making the eighth bit number 7. The size of the byte has historically been hardware-dependent and no definitive standards existed that mandated the size. Sizes from 1 to 48 bits have been used. The six-bit character code was an often-used implementation in early encoding systems, and computers using six-bit and nine-bit bytes were common in the 1960s. These systems often had memory wo ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Werner Buchholz
Werner Buchholz (24 October 1922 – 11 July 2019) was a German-American computer scientist. After growing up in Europe, Buchholz moved to Canada and then to the United States. He worked for International Business Machines (IBM) in New York. In June 1956, he coined the term "byte" for a unit of digital information. In 1990, he was recognized as a computer pioneer by the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers. Biography Early life Werner Buchholz was born on 24 October 1922 in Detmold, Germany. His older brother, Carl Hellmut and he were the sons of the merchant and his wife, . Due to the growing anti-semitism in Detmold in 1936, the family moved to Cologne. Werner was able to go to England in 1938 where he attended school, while Carl Hellmut emigrated to America. Because of the threat of invasion in May 1940, Werner with other refugee students was interned by the British and later sent to Canada. With the help of the Jewish community in Toronto, he was released in ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Octet (computing)
The octet is a unit of digital information in computing and telecommunications that consists of eight bits. The term is often used when the term byte might be ambiguous, as the byte has historically been used for storage units of a variety of sizes. The term ''octad(e)'' for eight bits is no longer common. Definition The international standard IEC 60027-2, chapter 3.8.2, states that a byte is an octet of bits. However, the unit byte has historically been platform-dependent and has represented various storage sizes in the history of computing. Due to the influence of several major computer architectures and product lines, the byte became overwhelmingly associated with eight bits. This meaning of ''byte'' is codified in such standards as ISO/IEC 80000-13. While ''byte'' and ''octet'' are often used synonymously, those working with certain legacy systems are careful to avoid ambiguity. Octets can be represented using number systems of varying bases such as the he ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Bracket
A bracket is either of two tall fore- or back-facing punctuation marks commonly used to isolate a segment of text or data from its surroundings. Typically deployed in symmetric pairs, an individual bracket may be identified as a 'left' or 'right' bracket or, alternatively, an "opening bracket" or "closing bracket", respectively, depending on the directionality of the context. Specific forms of the mark include parentheses (also called "rounded brackets"), square brackets, curly brackets (also called 'braces'), and angle brackets (also called 'chevrons'), as well as various less common pairs of symbols. As well as signifying the overall class of punctuation, the word "bracket" is commonly used to refer to a specific form of bracket, which varies from region to region. In most English-speaking countries, an unqualified word "bracket" refers to the parenthesis (round bracket); in the United States, the square bracket. Various forms of brackets are used in mathematics, with s ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Backslash
The backslash is a typographical mark used mainly in computing and mathematics. It is the mirror image of the common slash . It is a relatively recent mark, first documented in the 1930s. History , efforts to identify either the origin of this character or its purpose before the 1960s have not been successful. The earliest known reference found to date is a 1937 maintenance manual from the Teletype Corporation with a photograph showing the keyboard of its Kleinschmidt keyboard perforator WPE-3 using the Wheatstone system. The symbol was called the "diagonal key", and given a (non-standard) Morse code of . (This is the code for the slash symbol, entered backwards.) In June 1960, IBM published an "Extended character set standard" that includes the symbol at 0x19. Referencing Computer Standards Collection, Archives Center, National Museum of American History, Smithsonian Institution, box 1. In September 1961, Bob Bemer (IBM) proposed to the X3.2 standards committee that , ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Escape Character
In computing and telecommunication, an escape character is a character (computing), character that invokes an alternative interpretation on the following characters in a character sequence. An escape character is a particular case of metacharacters. Generally, the judgement of whether something is an escape character or not depends on the context. In the telecommunications field, escape characters are used to indicate that the following characters are encoded differently. This is used to alter control characters that would otherwise be noticed and acted on by the underlying telecommunications hardware. In this context, the use of escape characters is often referred to as quoting. Definition An escape character may not have its own meaning, so all escape sequences are of two or more characters. Escape characters are part of the formal syntax, syntax for many programming languages, data formats, and communication protocols. For a given alphabet (computer science), alphabet an es ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Character (computing)
In computer and machine-based telecommunications terminology, a character is a unit of information that roughly corresponds to a grapheme, grapheme-like unit, or symbol, such as in an alphabet or syllabary in the written form of a natural language. Examples of characters include letters, numerical digits, common punctuation marks (such as "." or "-"), and whitespace. The concept also includes control characters, which do not correspond to visible symbols but rather to instructions to format or process the text. Examples of control characters include carriage return and tab as well as other instructions to printers or other devices that display or otherwise process text. Characters are typically combined into strings. Historically, the term ''character'' was used to denote a specific number of contiguous bits. While a character is most commonly assumed to refer to 8 bits (one byte) today, other options like the 6-bit character code were once popular, and the 5-bit Baud ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Hugh McGregor Ross
Hugh McGregor Ross (31 August 1917 – 1 September 2014) was an early pioneer in the history of British computing. He was employed by Ferranti from the mid-1960s, where he worked on the Pegasus thermionic valve computer. He was involved in the standardization of ASCII and ISO 646 and worked closely with Bob Bemer. ASCII was first known in Europe as the Bemer–Ross Code. He was also one of the four main designers of ISO 6937, with Peter Fenwick, Bernard Marti and Loek Zeckendorf. He was one of the principal architects of the Universal Character Set ISO/IEC 10646 when it was first conceived. Hugh was an expert in the Gospel of Thomas and wrote several books about it. He was a Quaker Quakers are people who belong to a historically Protestant Christian set of denominations known formally as the Religious Society of Friends. Members of these movements ("theFriends") are generally united by a belief in each human's abili ..., and also wrote about George Fox. His workin ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
COBOL
COBOL (; an acronym for "common business-oriented language") is a compiled English-like computer programming language designed for business use. It is an imperative, procedural and, since 2002, object-oriented language. COBOL is primarily used in business, finance, and administrative systems for companies and governments. COBOL is still widely used in applications deployed on mainframe computers, such as large-scale batch and transaction processing jobs. However, due to its declining popularity and the retirement of experienced COBOL programmers, programs are being migrated to new platforms, rewritten in modern languages or replaced with software packages. Most programming in COBOL is now purely to maintain existing applications; however, many large financial institutions were still developing new systems in COBOL as late as 2006. COBOL was designed in 1959 by CODASYL and was partly based on the programming language FLOW-MATIC designed by Grace Hopper. It was created a ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
FLOW-MATIC
FLOW-MATIC, originally known as B-0 (Business Language version 0), was the first English-like data processing language. It was developed for the UNIVAC I at Remington Rand under Grace Hopper from 1955 to 1959, and helped shape the development of COBOL. Development Hopper had found that business data processing customers were uncomfortable with mathematical notation: In late 1953, she proposed that data processing problems should be expressed using English keywords, but Rand management considered the idea unfeasible. In early 1955, she and her team wrote a specification for such a programming language and implemented a prototype. The FLOW-MATIC compiler became publicly available in early 1958 and was substantially complete in 1959.Sammet (1969) p. 316 Innovations and influence The Laning and Zierler system was the first programming language to parse algebraic formulae. When Hopper became aware of that language in 1954, it altered the trajectory of her work. FLOW-MATIC wa ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
