take for granted today . . .
George
[EMAIL PROTECTED]
washingtonpost.com
Computer Pioneer Bob Bemer, 84
By Patricia Sullivan
Washington Post Staff Writer
Friday, June 25, 2004; Page B06
Robert W. "Bob" Bemer, 84, who helped invent the language used by most of
the world's computers to translate text to numbers and who was the first
scientist to warn of the Y2K problem, died of cancer June 22 at his home on
Possum Kingdom Lake in Texas.
Without the invention of the computer code ASCII, there would be no e-mail,
no World Wide Web, no laser printers and no video games. Mr. Bemer, known as
"the father of ASCII," created the code in 1961 by assigning standard
numeric values to letters, numbers, punctuation marks and other characters.
"We had over 60 different ways to represent characters in computers," Mr.
Bemer told Computerworld magazine in 1999, describing the time before the
American Standard Code for Information Interchange was created. "It was a
real Tower of Babel."
He was well known in the computer industry (The Washington Post in 1999
said, "In the weenieworld of data processing, he is a minor deity"), but he
broke into wider public consciousness when government and businesses began
to panic about the "millennium bug" that threatened to shut down the
computer systems on which society had grown so dependent.
Mr. Bemer had first published a warning in 1971 about the problems that
would arise from using two digits instead of four to represent years in
computer code. Unlike some of the doomsayers who came after him, he knew
what he was talking about: He was involved in the original effort to create
government standards for the computer industry.
Having learned from work he had done in the 1950s on genealogical records
for the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, he realized that
truncating a year's date was a penny-wise and pound-foolish solution to the
cost of saving computer space. But Pentagon bureaucrats, among the largest
computer users on Earth, refused to accept that 1999 was a better code than
99. The National Bureau of Standards went along, although it said
programmers could voluntarily use four instead of two numbers.
What that decision led to was the fear, as 1999 turned to 2000, that data
stored deep in computer code would misinterpret 00 not as the year 2000 but
as 1900, or even 1000. Data might scramble, possibly causing nuclear
reactors to go haywire, credit card transactions to vanish and automated
processes that govern prison door locks, airline operations and giant dam
gates to refuse to turn on or shut down.
"It was the fault of everybody, just everybody," Bemer told Time magazine
and many others. "If [Adm.] Grace Hopper [the founder of COBOL] and I were
at fault, it was for making the language so easy that anybody could get in
on the act."
Mr. Bemer kept up the alarm, even trying to get President Richard M. Nixon
to declare 1970 "the year of the computer" in order to highlight the
problem. He wrote about the problem for the technically literate in the
Honeywell Computer Journal in 1971 and for the public in Interface Age in
1979. The response was derision -- when anyone bothered to respond. He
continued the warnings until he retired in 1982. No one listened until it
was almost too late.
Although the public may have thought the millennium warnings were overblown,
an estimated $122 billion was spent in the United States alone to fix the
Y2K problem, according to IDC, a technology and telecommunications research
firm.
"I think he took a lot of pride in the fact that there wasn't a huge
problem, and maybe people like him who were sounding the alarm were getting
the companies to do what they needed to do," said his stepson, Glen Peeler.
Throughout his career, Mr. Bemer had a knack for being in the right place at
the right time. He helped Hopper create the computer language that he named
COBOL, or Common Business Oriented Language. He helped create the standard
measurement of eight bits per byte. Computer users have Mr. Bemer to thank
for the backslash character and for the escape sequence, which allows a
computer to break from one language and enter another.
"I used to say that I never got a nickel for the escape sequence. A nice
receptionist at the Dallas InfoMart did give me five pennies, but I spent
them," he said on his Web site.
Mr. Bemer did not cash in on the financial bonanza of the computer
revolution, his family said. His cars bore the vanity license tags ASCII and
COBOL. He lived in a cliff-top house two hours west of Dallas on a
reservoir, which he told visitors would have been handy in case he needed to
"drain the lake" for drinking water. He collected Pogo Possum comic books
and made lists of every airplane flight he'd ever taken, every country he'd
visited and every trip to see his parents.
He was born in Sault Ste. Marie, Mich. He received a bachelor's degree in
mathematics at Albion College in 1940 and a certificate of aeronautical
engineering at the Curtiss-Wright Technical Institute in Santa Monica,
Calif., the next year. He spent time as a machinist, furniture-maker and
movie-set designer before he was hired as a programmer at RAND Corp. in
1951.
He worked for Lockheed Aircraft, Marquardt Aircraft, Lockheed Missiles and
Space, IBM Corp. and the Univac division of Sperry Rand. He went to Paris in
1965 for a year to work for Bull General Electric, then back to the United
States with GE and Honeywell Information Systems until his 1982 retirement.
He promptly started his own software company, which he eventually sold to
BigiSoft Inc., retaining the title of chief scientist.
"He was a hardworking man," Peeler said. "He was a relic, a throwback,
old-school. He was always on a computer doing things."
In 2003, the Institute of Electrical and Electronic Engineers' Computer
Society awarded him its Computer Pioneer medal.
He was married six times to five women and had five children by his first
wife and a sixth by another. He also had two stepchildren, nine
grandchildren and five great-grandchildren.
(c) 2004 The Washington Post Company
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