Robert William Bemer was a
computer scientistA computer scientist is a scientist who has acquired knowledge of computer science, the study of the theoretical foundations of information and computation and their application in computer systems....
best known for his work at
IBMInternational Business Machines Corporation or IBM is an American multinational technology and consulting corporation headquartered in Armonk, New York, United States. IBM manufactures and sells computer hardware and software, and it offers infrastructure, hosting and consulting services in areas...
during the late 1950s and early 1960s.
Biography
Born in
Sault Ste. Marie, MichiganSault Ste. Marie is a city in and the county seat of Chippewa County in the U.S. state of Michigan. It is in the north-eastern end of Michigan's Upper Peninsula, on the Canadian border, separated from its twin city of Sault Ste. Marie, Ontario, by the St. Marys River...
, Bemer graduated from
Cranbrook SchoolCranbrook Schools is a private, PK–12 school located on a campus in Bloomfield Hills, Michigan. The schools comprise a co-educational elementary school, a middle school with separate schools for boys and girls, and a co-educational high school with boarding facilities...
in 1936 and took an
A.B.A Bachelor of Arts , from the Latin artium baccalaureus, is a bachelor's degree awarded for an undergraduate course or program in either the liberal arts, the sciences, or both...
in
MathematicsMathematics is the study of quantity, space, structure, and change. Mathematicians seek out patterns and formulate new conjectures. Mathematicians resolve the truth or falsity of conjectures by mathematical proofs, which are arguments sufficient to convince other mathematicians of their validity...
at
Albion CollegeAlbion College is a private liberal arts college located in Albion, Michigan. Related to the United Methodist Church, it was founded in 1835 and was the first private college in Michigan to have a chapter of Phi Beta Kappa. It has a student population of about 1500.The school's sports teams are...
in 1940. He earned a Certificate in Aeronautical Engineering at
Curtiss-Wright Technical InstituteThe Curtiss-Wright Technical Institute was an early professional trade school operated by the Curtiss-Wright corporation for aircraft maintenance training...
in 1941.
Bemer began his career as an aerodynamicist at
Douglas Aircraft CompanyThe Douglas Aircraft Company was an American aerospace manufacturer, based in Long Beach, California. It was founded in 1921 by Donald Wills Douglas, Sr. and later merged with McDonnell Aircraft in 1967 to form McDonnell Douglas...
in 1941, then worked for
RAND CorporationRAND Corporation is a nonprofit global policy think tank first formed to offer research and analysis to the United States armed forces by Douglas Aircraft Company. It is currently financed by the U.S. government and private endowment, corporations including the healthcare industry, universities...
from 1951,
IBMInternational Business Machines Corporation or IBM is an American multinational technology and consulting corporation headquartered in Armonk, New York, United States. IBM manufactures and sells computer hardware and software, and it offers infrastructure, hosting and consulting services in areas...
from 1957, and
HoneywellHoneywell International, Inc. is a major conglomerate company that produces a variety of consumer products, engineering services, and aerospace systems for a wide variety of customers, from private consumers to major corporations and governments....
from 1974. He also worked for
UNIVACUNIVAC is the name of a business unit and division of the Remington Rand company formed by the 1950 purchase of the Eckert-Mauchly Computer Corporation, founded four years earlier by ENIAC inventors J. Presper Eckert and John Mauchly, and the associated line of computers which continues to this day...
.
He served on the committee which amalgamated the design for his
COMTRANCOMTRAN is an early programming language developed at IBM. It was intended as the business programming equivalent of the scientific programming language FORTRAN . It served as one of the forerunners to the COBOL language...
language with
Grace HopperRear Admiral Grace Murray Hopper was an American computer scientist and United States Navy officer. A pioneer in the field, she was one of the first programmers of the Harvard Mark I computer, and developed the first compiler for a computer programming language...
's
FLOW-MATICFLOW-MATIC, originally known as B-0 , was the first English-like data processing language. It was developed for the UNIVAC I at Remington Rand under Grace Hopper.-Development:...
and thus produced the specifications for
COBOLCOBOL is one of the oldest programming languages. Its name is an acronym for COmmon Business-Oriented Language, defining its primary domain in business, finance, and administrative systems for companies and governments....
. He also served, with
Hugh McGregor RossHugh McGregor Ross is an early pioneer in the history of British computing. He worked for Ferranti from the mid-1960s, where he worked on the Pegasus thermionic valve computer. He was involved in the standardization of ASCII and ISO 646 and worked closely with Bob Bemer. ASCII was first known in...
and others, on the separate committee which defined the
ASCIIThe American Standard Code for Information Interchange is a character-encoding scheme based on the ordering of the English alphabet. ASCII codes represent text in computers, communications equipment, and other devices that use text...
character codeset in 1960, contributing several
characterIn computer and machine-based telecommunications terminology, a character is a unit of information that roughly corresponds to a grapheme, grapheme-like unit, or symbol, such as in an alphabet or syllabary in the written form of a natural language....
s which had not previously been used by computers including the
ESCape characterIn computing and telecommunication, an escape character is a character which invokes an alternative interpretation on subsequent characters in a character sequence. An escape character is a particular case of metacharacters...
, the
backslashThe backslash is a typographical mark used mainly in computing. It was first introduced to computers in 1960 by Bob Bemer. Sometimes called a reverse solidus or a slosh, it is the mirror image of the common slash....
character, and the curly bracket characters. As a result he is sometimes known as
The Father of ASCII.
Bemer is probably the earliest proponent of the
Software FactoryIn software engineering and enterprise software architecture, a software factory is an organizational structure that specializes in producing computer software applications or software components according to specific, externally-defined end-user requirements through an assembly process...
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-sharingTime-sharing is the sharing of a computing resource among many users by means of multiprogramming and multi-tasking. Its introduction in the 1960s, and emergence as the prominent model of computing in the 1970s, represents a major technological shift in the history of computing.By allowing a large...
concept and the first attempts to prepare for the
Year 2000 problemThe Year 2000 problem was a problem for both digital and non-digital documentation and data storage situations which resulted from the practice of abbreviating a four-digit year to two digits.In computer programs, the practice of representing the year with two...
in publications as early as 1971. Acting in an advisory capacity, Bob and Honeywell employees Eric Clamons and Richard Keys developed
TEX, the
Text Executive Programming LanguageIn 1979, Honeywell Information Systems announced a new programming language for their time-sharing service named TEX, an acronym for the Text Executive processor...
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 still online at
www.bobbemer.com.
Bemer died at his home in Possum Kingdom Lake, Texas in 2004 at age 84 after a battle with
cancerCancer , known medically as a malignant neoplasm, is a large group of different diseases, all involving unregulated cell growth. In cancer, cells divide and grow uncontrollably, forming malignant tumors, and invade nearby parts of the body. The cancer may also spread to more distant parts of the...
.
External links