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. February 8 is the 39th day of the year in the Gregorian calendar. ... Year 1920 (MCMXX) was a leap year starting on Thursday. ... June 22 is the 173rd day of the year (174th in leap years) in the Gregorian calendar, with 192 days remaining. ... 2004 (MMIV) was a leap year starting on Thursday of the Gregorian calendar. ... International Business Machines Corporation (known as IBM or Big Blue; NYSE: IBM) is a multinational computer technology and consulting corporation headquartered in Armonk, New York, USA. The company is one of the few information technology companies with a continuous history dating back to the 19th century. ... This does not cite its references or sources. ... The 1960s decade refers to the years from January 1, 1960 to December 31, 1969, inclusive. ...

Born in Sault Ste. Marie, Michigan, Bemer graduated from Cranbrook School 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. Nickname: The Soo Location of Sault Ste. ... This article is about the private Pre K-12 school in the United States; For alternate uses, including other Cranbrook Schools, see Cranbrook (disambiguation). ... 1936 (MCMXXXVI) was a leap year starting on Wednesday (link will take you to calendar). ... A Bachelor of Arts (B.A. or A.B.) is an undergraduate academic degree awarded for a course or program in the arts and/or sciences. ... Albion College is a small, private liberal arts college located in Albion, Michigan. ... This article does not cite its references or sources. ... Aerospace engineering is the branch of engineering concerning aircraft, spacecraft and related topics. ... For the movie, see 1941 (film). ...

Bemer 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. Aerodynamics is a branch of fluid dynamics concerned with the study of gas flows, first analysed by George Cayley in the 1800s. ... The Douglas Aircraft Company was founded by Donald Wills Douglas, Sr. ... For the movie, see 1941 (film). ... The RAND Corporation is a nonprofit global policy think tank first formed to offer research and analysis to the United States armed forces. ... 1951 (MCMLI) was a common year starting on Monday; see its calendar. ... 1957 (MCMLVII) was a common year starting on Tuesday of the Gregorian calendar. ... Honeywell Heating Specialties Company Stock Certificate dated 1924 signed by Mark C. Honeywell - courtesy of Scripophily. ... 1974 (MCMLXXIV) was a common year starting on Tuesday. ... UNIVAC serves as the catch-all name for the American manufacturers of the lines of mainframe computers by that name, which through mergers and acquisitions underwent numerous name changes. ...

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. COMTRAN (COMmercial TRANslator) is a programming language which served as the forerunner to the COBOL language. ... Rear Admiral Grace Murray Hopper (December 9, 1906 – January 1, 1992) was an American computer scientist and United States Navy officer. ... FLOW-MATIC, Originally B-0, and possibly the first English-like Data Processing language. ... COBOL is a third-generation programming language, and one of the oldest programming languages still in active use. ... There are 95 printable ASCII characters, numbered 32 to 126. ... 1960 (MCMLX) was a leap year starting on Friday (the link is to a full 1960 calendar). ... In computing and telecommunication, an escape character is one which has a special meaning in a sequence of characters. ... First introduced in 1960 by Bob Bemer, the backslash, , is a typographical mark (glyph) used chiefly in computing. ... For technical reasons, :) and some similar combinations starting with : redirect here. ...

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. Alternate uses: see Timesharing Time-sharing is an approach to interactive computing in which a single computer is used to provide apparently simultaneous interactive general-purpose computing to multiple users by sharing processor time. ... The Year 2000 problem (also known as the Y2K problem, the millennium bug, and the Y2K Bug) was the result of a practice in early computer program design that caused some date-related processing to operate incorrectly for dates and times on and after January 1, 2000. ... 1971 (MCMLXXI) was a common year starting on Friday. ...

Bob Bemer maintained an extensive collection of archival material on early computer software development originally at www.bobbemer.com. Most of the content from that site has been archived at other websites (links listed below).

Bemer died at Possum Kingdom Lake, Texas, after a battle with cancer. Possum Kingdom Lake (popularly known as P.K.) is a 19,800 acre (80 km²) man made lake, first impounded in 1941. ... Cancer is a class of diseases or disorders characterized by uncontrolled division of cells and the ability of these to spread, either by direct growth into adjacent tissue through invasion, or by implantation into distant sites by metastasis (where cancer cells are transported through the bloodstream or lymphatic system). ...

External links

• A biography of Bob Bemer
• Archive of an Interview with Bob Bemer
• Move Over, BT: He Invented Links Bob Bemer's comments on patents

Archives of Bob Bemer's original website

• http://www.trailing-edge.com/~bobbemer/
• http://mercury.ccil.org/~remlaps/www.bobbemer.com/

Obituaries

• Washington Post
• The Register
• BBC News
• The Plain Dealeren:Robert William Bemer