Robert William Bemer (February 8, 1920 – June 22, 2004) was a

computer scientist A computer scientist is a scientist who specializes in the academic study of computer science. Computer scientists typically work on the theoretical side of computation. Although computer scientists can also focus their work and research on ...

best known for his work at

IBM International Business Machines Corporation (using the trademark IBM), nicknamed Big Blue, is an American Multinational corporation, multinational technology company headquartered in Armonk, New York, and present in over 175 countries. It is ...

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 A Bachelor of Arts (abbreviated B.A., BA, A.B. or AB; from the Latin ', ', or ') is the holder of a bachelor's degree awarded for an undergraduate program in the liberal arts, or, in some cases, other disciplines. A Bachelor of Arts deg ...

(B.A.) in

mathematics Mathematics is a field of study that discovers and organizes methods, Mathematical theory, theories and theorems that are developed and Mathematical proof, proved for the needs of empirical sciences and mathematics itself. There are many ar ...

Albion College Albion College is a Private college, private Liberal arts colleges in the United States, liberal arts college in Albion, Michigan. The college was founded in 1835 and its undergraduate population was approximately 1,500 students as of Fall 2021 ...

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 The Douglas Aircraft Company was an American aerospace manufacturer, aerospace and military, defense company based in Southern California. Founded in 1921 by Donald Wills Douglas Sr., it merged with McDonnell Aircraft in 1967 to form McDonnell D ...

in 1941, then worked for

RAND Corporation The RAND Corporation, doing business as RAND, is an American nonprofit global policy think tank, research institute, and public sector consulting firm. RAND engages in research and development (R&D) in several fields and industries. Since the ...

from 1951,

from 1957,

UNIVAC UNIVAC (Universal Automatic Computer) was a line of electronic digital stored-program computers starting with the products of the Eckert–Mauchly Computer Corporation. Later the name was applied to a division of the Remington Rand company and ...

–

Sperry Rand Sperry Corporation was a major American equipment and electronics company whose existence spanned more than seven decades of the 20th century. Sperry ceased to exist in 1986 following a prolonged hostile takeover bid engineered by Burroughs ...

in 1965,

Bull A bull is an intact (i.e., not Castration, castrated) adult male of the species ''Bos taurus'' (cattle). More muscular and aggressive than the females of the same species (i.e. cows proper), bulls have long been an important symbol cattle in r ...

from 1965,

General Electric General Electric Company (GE) was an American Multinational corporation, multinational Conglomerate (company), conglomerate founded in 1892, incorporated in the New York (state), state of New York and headquartered in Boston. Over the year ...

from 1970, and

Honeywell Honeywell International Inc. is an American publicly traded, multinational conglomerate corporation headquartered in Charlotte, North Carolina. It primarily operates in four areas of business: aerospace, building automation, industrial automa ...

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 forerunners ...

language with Grace Hopper's

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 Remington Rand, Inc. was an early American business machine manufactu ...

and thus produced the specifications for

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 ...

. He also served, with

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 Ferranti Pegasus, Pegasus Vacuum tube, thermionic valve ...

and others, on the separate committee which defined the

ASCII ASCII ( ), an acronym for American Standard Code for Information Interchange, is a character encoding standard for representing a particular set of 95 (English language focused) printable character, printable and 33 control character, control c ...

character codeset in 1960, contributing several characters which were not formerly used by computers including the escape (ESC),

backslash The backslash is a mark used mainly in computing and mathematics. It is the mirror image of the common slash (punctuation), slash . It is a relatively recent mark, first documented in the 1930s. It is sometimes called a hack, whack, Escape c ...

(\), 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 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 un ...

'') 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'' 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 In computing, time-sharing is the Concurrency (computer science), concurrent sharing of a computing resource among many tasks or users by giving each Process (computing), task or User (computing), user a small slice of CPU time, processing time. ...

concept in 1957 and the first attempts to prepare for the

Year 2000 problem The term year 2000 problem, or simply Y2K, refers to potential computer errors related to the Time formatting and storage bugs, formatting and storage of calendar data for dates in and after the year 2000. Many Computer program, programs repr ...

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'' (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 In computing, source code, or simply code or source, is a plain text computer program written in a programming language. A programmer writes the human readable source code to control the behavior of a computer. Since a computer, at base, only ...

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 Texas ( , ; or ) is the most populous U.S. state, state in the South Central United States, South Central region of the United States. It borders Louisiana to the east, Arkansas to the northeast, Oklahoma to the north, New Mexico to the we ...

in 2004 at age 84 after a battle with

cancer Cancer is a group of diseases involving Cell growth#Disorders, abnormal cell growth with the potential to Invasion (cancer), invade or Metastasis, spread to other parts of the body. These contrast with benign tumors, which do not spread. Po ...

. tp://ftp.eecs.utk.edu/pub/shuford/terminal/ascii_history.txt/ref>

References

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

Early life and education

Career

Death

References

Further reading

External links