Bob Bemer

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

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 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.

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.

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 Most of the content from that site has been archived at other websites (links listed below).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 Possum Kingdom Lake, Texas, after a battle with cancer.

Archives of Bob Bemer's original website
Obituaries
Retrieved from "http://en.wikipedia.org../../../b/o/b/Bob_Bemer_24d2.html"
Advanced Search
Included Web Search Engines


Safe Search

close

Top Matching Results

Occasionally Search.com will highlight specialized results that are based on the context of your query. Examples of specialized results include specific links to news, images, or video.

Top Matching Results may highlight information from other Search.com pages, content from the CNET Network of sites, or third party content. The listings are based purely on relevance. Search.com does not receive payment for listings in this section but our partners that provide this data may get paid for listing these products.

Sponsored Links

This section contains paid listings which have been purchased by companies that want to have their sites appear for specific search terms and related content. These listings are administered, sorted and maintained by a third party and are not endorsed by Search.com.

Search Results

Search.com sends your search query to several search engines at one time and integrates the results into one list which has been sorted by relevance using Search.com's proprietary algorithm. You can customize the list of search engines included in your metasearch from the preferences.

The search engines that are used in your metasearch may allow companies to pay to have their Web sites included within the results. To view the Paid Inclusion policy for a specific search engine, please visit their Web site. Search.com does not accept payment or share revenue with any search engine partner for listings in this section.