Bob Bemer | |
|---|---|
 | |
| Born | Robert William Bemer (1920-02-08)February 8, 1920 |
| Died | June 22, 2004(2004-06-22) (aged 84) Possum Kingdom Lake, Texas, US |
| Education | Albion College (B.A., Mathematics, 1940) Cranbrook Kingswood School |
| Known for | Early work as a computer pioneer, standardizingASCII |
| Scientific career | |
| Fields | Computer science |
| Institutions | Douglas Aircraft Company,RAND Corporation,IBM,UNIVAC –Sperry Rand,Bull,General Electric,Honeywell |
| Website | bobbemer |
Robert William Bemer (February 8, 1920 – June 22, 2004) was acomputer scientist best known for his work atIBM during the late 1950s and early 1960s.[1]
Born inSault Ste. Marie, Michigan, Bemer graduated fromCranbrook Kingswood School in 1936 and took aBachelor of Arts (B.A.) inmathematics atAlbion College in 1940. He earned a certificate inaeronautical engineering atCurtiss-Wright Technical Institute in 1941.
Bemer began his career as anaerodynamicist atDouglas Aircraft Company in 1941, then worked forRAND Corporation from 1951,IBM from 1957,UNIVAC –Sperry Rand in 1965,Bull from 1965,General Electric from 1970, andHoneywell from 1974.[2]
He served on the committee which amalgamated the design for hisCOMTRAN language withGrace Hopper'sFLOW-MATIC and thus produced the specifications forCOBOL. He also served, withHugh McGregor Ross and others, on the separate committee which defined theASCII character codeset in 1960, contributing severalcharacters which were not formerly used by computers including theescape (ESC),backslash (\), andcurly brackets ({}).[3] As a result, he is sometimes known asThe Father of ASCII.[1] In 2000, Bemer claimed to have proposed the termoctet (rather thanWerner Buchholz'byte) while heading software development atCie. Bull, France, between 1965 and 1966.[4] He also proposed the termhextet for 16-bit groups.[4]
Bemer is probably the earliest proponent of thesoftware factory concept. He mentioned it in his 1968 paper "The economics of program production".[5]
Other notable contributions to computing include the first publication of thetime-sharing concept in 1957 and the first attempts to prepare for theYear 2000 problem in publications as early as 1971.[6] Acting in an advisory capacity, Bob and Honeywell employees Eric Clamons and Richard Keys developed theText Executive Programming Language (TEX).[7]
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 whichsource code was unavailable. This involved detecting six and eight character operations atruntime 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 atwww.bobbemer.com.
Bemer died at his home inPossum Kingdom Lake,Texas in 2004 at age 84 after a battle withcancer.[8][9][10][11]
[…] I came to work forIBM, and saw all the confusion caused by the 64-character limitation. Especially when we started to think about word processing, which would require both upper and lower case. […] I even made a proposal (in view ofSTRETCH, the very first computer I know of with an 8-bit byte) that would extend the number ofpunch card character codes to 256 […]. So some folks started thinking about 7-bit characters, but this was ridiculous. With IBM's STRETCH computer as background, handling 64-character words divisible into groups of 8 (I designed the character set for it, under the guidance of Dr.Werner Buchholz, the man who DID coin the term "byte" for an 8-bit grouping). […] It seemed reasonable to make a universal 8-bit character set, handling up to 256. In those days my mantra was "powers of 2 are magic". And so the group I headed developed and justified such a proposal […] TheIBM 360 used 8-bit characters, although not ASCII directly. Thus Buchholz's "byte" caught on everywhere. I myself did not like the name for many reasons. The design had 8 bits moving around in parallel. But then came a new IBM part, with 9 bits for self-checking, both inside the CPU and in thetape drives. I exposed this 9-bit byte to the press in 1973. But long before that, when I headed software operations forCie. Bull in France in 1965-66, I insisted that "byte" be deprecated in favor of "octet". […] It is justified by new communications methods that can carry 16, 32, 64, and even 128 bits in parallel. But some foolish people now refer to a "16-bit byte" because of this parallel transfer, which is visible in theUNICODE set. I'm not sure, but maybe this should be called a "hextet". […]
