Bob Bemer

Bob Bemer (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 Academy 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.

He 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.

Bemer died at Possum Kingdom Lake, Texas , after a battle with cancer.

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