Bob Bemer
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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.[1]
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 had not previously been used by computers including the ESCape character, the backslash character, and the curly bracket characters. As a result he is sometimes known as The Father of ASCII.[1]
Bemer is probably the earlier proponent of the Software Factory concept. He mentioned it in his 1968 paper “The economics of program production”.[2]
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 was not 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 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 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 Most of the content from that site has been archived at other websites (links listed below).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.[3][4][5]
[edit] References
[edit] External links
- Archive of an Interview with Bob Bemer
- Move Over, BT: He Invented Links Bob Bemer's comments on patents
- Archives of Bob Bemer's website containing material pertaining to the earliest years of the computer software industry
