Everything about Robert Bemer totally explained
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.
Born in
Sault Ste. Marie, Michigan, Bemer graduated from
Cranbrook School in 1936 and took an
A.B. in
Mathematics at
Albion College in 1940. He earned a Certificate in
Aeronautical Engineering at
Curtiss-Wright Technical Institute in 1941.
Bemer began his career as an
aerodynamicist at
Douglas Aircraft Company in 1941, then worked for
RAND Corporation from 1951, IBM from 1957, and
Honeywell from 1974. He also worked for
UNIVAC.
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 on the separate committee which defined the
ASCII character codeset in 1960, contributing several
characters which hadn't previously been used by computers including the
ESCape character, the
backslash character, and the
curly bracket characters. As a result he's sometimes known as
The Father of ASCII.
Other notable contributions to computing include the first publication of the
time-sharing concept and the first attempts to prepare for the
Year 2000 problem in publications as early as
1971.
In the late 1990s, as a retiree, Bob invented an approach to Y2K (Year 2000) date conversion, to avoid anticipated problems when dates without centuries were compared in programs for which source code wasn't available. This involved detecting six and eight character operations at run time and checking their operands, adjusting the comparison so that low years in the new century didn't appear to precede the last years of the twentieth century.
Bob Bemer maintained an extensive collection of archival material on early computer software development originally at www.bobbemer.com. Most of the content from that site has been archived at other websites (links listed below).
Bemer died at his home in
Possum Kingdom Lake, Texas in 2004 at age 84 after a battle with
cancer.
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