Bemer began his career as an
aerodynamicist at
Douglas Aircraft Company in 1941, then worked for
RAND Corporation from 1951,
IBM from 1957,
UNIVAC –
Sperry Rand in 1965,
Bull from 1965,
General Electric from 1970, and
Honeywell from 1974. 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, with
Hugh McGregor Ross and others, on the separate committee which defined the
ASCII character codeset in 1960, contributing several
characters which were not formerly used by computers including the
escape (ESC),
backslash (\), and
curly brackets ({}). 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 in 1957 and the first attempts to prepare for the
Year 2000 problem in publications as early as 1971. Acting in an advisory capacity, Bob and Honeywell employees Eric Clamons and Richard Keys developed the
Text Executive Programming Language (TEX). 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 which
source code was unavailable. This involved detecting six and eight character operations at
runtime 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 at www.bobbemer.com. == Death ==