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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, UNIVACSperry 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 COMTRAN (COMmercial TRANslator) is an early programming language developed at IBM. It was intended as the business programming equivalent of the scientific programming language FORTRAN (FORmula TRANslator). It served as one of the forerunner ...
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 codeset in 1960, contributing several
character Character or Characters may refer to: Arts, entertainment, and media Literature * ''Character'' (novel), a 1936 Dutch novel by Ferdinand Bordewijk * ''Characters'' (Theophrastus), a classical Greek set of character sketches attributed to The ...
s which were not formerly used by computers including the
escape Escape or Escaping may refer to: Computing * Escape character, in computing and telecommunication, a character which signifies that what follows takes an alternative interpretation ** Escape sequence, a series of characters used to trigger some s ...
(ESC), backslash (\), and curly brackets (). As a result, he is sometimes known as ''The Father of ASCII''. In 2000, Bemer claimed to have proposed the term octet (rather than Werner Buchholz' '' byte'') while heading software development at Cie. Bull, France, between 1965 and 1966. He also proposed the term hextet for 16-bit groups. Bemer is probably the earliest proponent of the ''
software factory A software factory is a structured collection of related software assets that aids in producing computer software applications or software components according to specific, externally defined end-user requirements through an assembly process. A s ...
'' concept. He mentioned it in his 1968 paper "The economics of program production". Other notable contributions to computing include the first publication of the time-sharing concept in 1957 and the first attempts to prepare for the Year 2000 problem in publications as early as 1971. Acting in an advisory capacity, Bob and Honeywell employees Eric Clamons and Richard Keys developed the ''
Text Executive Programming Language In 1979, Honeywell Information Systems announced a new programming language for their time-sharing service named TEX, an acronym for the Text Executive text processing system. TEX was a first-generation scripting language developed around the time ...
'' (TEX). In the late 1990s, as a retiree, Bob invented an approach to Year 2000 (Y2K) date conversion, to avoid anticipated problems when dates without centuries were compared in programs for which source code was unavailable. This involved detecting six and eight character operations at runtime and checking their operands, adjusting the comparison so that low years in the new century did not appear to precede the last years of the twentieth century. Bob Bemer maintained an extensive collection of archival material on early computer software development a
www.bobbemer.com


Death

Bemer died at his home in Possum Kingdom Lake, Texas in 2004 at age 84 after a battle with cancer. tp://ftp.eecs.utk.edu/pub/shuford/terminal/ascii_history.txt/ref>


References


Further reading


Transcript of an interview with Bob Bemer
* ttp://www.thocp.net/biographies/bemer_bob.htm Biography, showing the ASCII car license plate


External links


Bob Bemer's website
{{DEFAULTSORT:Bemer, Bob 1920 births 2004 deaths American aerospace engineers Albion College alumni IBM employees People from Sault Ste. Marie, Michigan Cranbrook Educational Community alumni Deaths from cancer in Texas American computer scientists