Bemer, the father of ascii, dies
p2pnet.net News:- Bob Bemer died on June 22 at his home Possum Kingdom Lake, 120 miles west of Dallas, aged 84.
So just who is he? – asks his web page here. And through Edmund Arranga of the COBOL Report answerss:
Mr. Bemer’s accomplishments resonate so deeply one almost assumes they have been with us always, snatched out of the ether by a collective consciousness, instead of having been the creation of one man.
A short list includes:
- Helped create COBOL (as in “Grandfather of”
- Coined the words COBOL and CODASYL
- Invented the ESCape sequence
- Created the PICTURE clause
- Helped create and standardize the ASCII character set (as in “Father of” [4])
- Put the backslash into the ASCII set
- Helped create the 8-bit per byte standard”
Motto (original) for a Half-Century: ((((DO SOMETHING!) SMALL) USEFUL) NOW!)
June 25th, 2004 at 7:20 pm
At least he’ll go down in history as having achieved something useful. What will they say about the music industry?
Morgan
June 26th, 2004 at 4:57 am
Rest in peace. Our fist forays in technology our long enough in the past now that the creators are passing away, but their mark will forever be felt.