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 Sault Ste. Marie ( ') is the only city in, and county seat of, Chippewa County in the U.S. state of Michigan. With a population of 13,337 at the 2020 census, it is the second-most populated city in the Upper Peninsula after Marquette. It i ...

, Bemer graduated from

Cranbrook Kingswood School (''In The Right Way Quickly'') , established = , closed = , type = Independent , religious_affiliation = Methodist , president = , head_label = Headmaste ...

in 1936 and took a

Bachelor of Arts Bachelor of arts (BA or AB; from the Latin ', ', or ') is a bachelor's degree awarded for an undergraduate program in the arts, or, in some cases, other disciplines. A Bachelor of Arts degree course is generally completed in three or four year ...

(B.A.) in mathematics at

Albion College Albion College is a private liberal arts college in Albion, Michigan. The college was founded in 1835 and its undergraduate population was approximately 1,500 students in 2014. They participate in NCAA Division III and the Michigan Interco ...

in 1940. He earned a certificate in

aeronautical engineering Aerospace engineering is the primary field of engineering concerned with the development of aircraft and spacecraft. It has two major and overlapping branches: aeronautical engineering and astronautical engineering. Avionics engineering is sim ...

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 Ameri ...

in 1941.

Career

Bemer began his career as an

aerodynamicist Aerodynamics, from grc, ἀήρ ''aero'' (air) + grc, δυναμική (dynamics), is the study of the motion of air, particularly when affected by a solid object, such as an airplane wing. It involves topics covered in the field of fluid dyn ...

at Douglas Aircraft Company in 1941, then worked for RAND Corporation from 1951, IBM 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 an ...

–

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 Burroug ...

in 1965,

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

from 1965,

General Electric General Electric Company (GE) is an American multinational conglomerate founded in 1892, and incorporated in New York state and headquartered in Boston. The company operated in sectors including healthcare, aviation, power, renewable en ...

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 technologies, performance ma ...

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 Grace Brewster Hopper (; December 9, 1906 – January 1, 1992) was an American computer scientist, mathematician, and United States Navy rear admiral. One of the first programmers of the Harvard Mark I computer, she was a pioneer of compu ...

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 ...

and thus produced the specifications for COBOL. 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 Pegasus thermionic valve computer. He was involved in t ...

and others, on the separate committee which defined the

ASCII ASCII ( ), abbreviated from American Standard Code for Information Interchange, is a character encoding standard for electronic communication. ASCII codes represent text in computers, telecommunications equipment, and other devices. Because ...

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 (ESC),

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 ...

(\), and

curly brackets 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 'r ...

(). As a result, he is sometimes known as ''The Father of ASCII''. In 2000, Bemer claimed to have proposed the term

octet Octet may refer to: Music * Octet (music), ensemble consisting of eight instruments or voices, or composition written for such an ensemble ** String octet, a piece of music written for eight string instruments *** Octet (Mendelssohn), 1825 compos ...

(rather than

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 ...

' ''

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 uni ...

'') while heading software development at

Cie. Bull Bull SAS (also known as Groupe Bull, Bull Information Systems, or simply Bull) is a French computer company headquartered in Les Clayes-sous-Bois, in the western suburbs of Paris. The company has also been known at various times as Bull General El ...

, France, between 1965 and 1966. He also proposed the term

hextet In computing, a hextet, or a ''chomp'', is a sixteen-bit aggregation, or four nibbles. As a nibble typically is notated in hexadecimal format, a hextet consists of 4 hexadecimal digits. A hextet is the unofficial name for each of the 8 blocks in a ...

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 In computing, time-sharing is the sharing of a computing resource among many users at the same time by means of multiprogramming and multi-tasking.DEC Timesharing (1965), by Peter Clark, The DEC Professional, Volume 1, Number 1 Its emergence ...

concept in 1957 and the first attempts to prepare for the

Year 2000 problem The year 2000 problem, also known as the Y2K problem, Y2K scare, millennium bug, Y2K bug, Y2K glitch, Y2K error, or simply Y2K refers to potential computer errors related to the formatting and storage of calendar data for dates in and after ...

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 In computing, source code, or simply code, is any collection of code, with or without comments, written using a human-readable programming language, usually as plain text. The source code of a program is specially designed to facilitate the w ...

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 Possum Kingdom Lake (popularly known as P.K.), is a reservoir on the Brazos River located primarily in Palo Pinto County Texas. It was the first water supply reservoir constructed in the Brazos River basin. The lake has an area of approximately ...

Texas Texas (, ; Spanish: ''Texas'', ''Tejas'') is a state in the South Central region of the United States. At 268,596 square miles (695,662 km2), and with more than 29.1 million residents in 2020, it is the second-largest U.S. state by ...

in 2004 at age 84 after a battle with

cancer Cancer is a group of diseases involving abnormal cell growth with the potential to invade or spread to other parts of the body. These contrast with benign tumors, which do not spread. Possible signs and symptoms include a lump, abnormal b ...

. 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