Slashdot Mirror
Computer Pioneer Bob Bemer Dies
tpconcannon writes "Bob Bemer, the man who helped introduce the backslash as well as the escape key to computing, has passed away at his home at the age of 78. He also helped develop ASCII during the 60's at IBM. More interesting is that he predicted the Y2K bug all the way back in 1971!"
And I posted this yesterday.
that he's been ALT-F4'ed?
82 73 80
I want the fire back.
His website is here. There are a lot of interesting tidbits on his history page.
Predicted it back in '71? That seems like something a smart person would do, shame the rest of us didn't follow up on it before 30 years later.
In Memory Of A True Geek
Let's give credit where credit is due. Al gore clearly took the initiative in creating the backslash, the ESC key, and ASCII.
I predicted the Y10K problem over 8000 years before it's going to happen.
www.bobbemer.com (official website)
And the google cache for the impending slashdotting
Among the more interesting tidbits is that he coined the word COBOL
bash: rtfm: command not found
Billions of dollars were spent in the US trying to fix the Y2K bug. And when the calendar rolled over to year 2000 precisely *nothing* happened.
How much money and effort did developing countries spend on fixing the Y2K bug; how much did they spend in places like Russia? Next to nothing? And when the calendar rolled over to year 2000 precisely *nothing* happened.
(shrug)
The Y2K bug was NOT a hoax. It was a valid problem that was (for the most part) solved in time. Big difference.
The guy must have been lucky or just had a lot of foresight. We could all pretend to act like we knew who he was and say he'll be missed but that would be a lie so let's just give him credit for his contributions. He gets an "A" in my book for thinking up "Esc" and "\", unlike the bastard who invented "CAPS LOCK" !!!
"Bob Bemer... passed away at his home at the age of 78.
The AP reported he was 84, and Wikipedia confirms that he was born in 1920.
In any case, I'd like to commemorate Mr. Bemer with the traditional Slashdot version of a Viking funeral:
I just heard some sad news on talk radio - COBOL standardizer/Father of ASCII Bob Bemer was found dead in his Texas home this morning. There weren't any more details. I'm sure everyone in the Slashdot community will miss him - even if you didn't enjoy his character set, there's no denying his contributions to popular culture. Truly an American icon.
Opinions on the Twiddler2 hand-held keyboard?
I keep pressing it and yet I'm still stuck at my crappy job....sigh
actually I am happy to see you, however that is in fact a banana in my pocket.
ASCII really is something of beauty. It is universal (debatable) and useful. Everyone knows how to read or write it. It is simple to use for config for a program because almost any language can read it and interpret it. It is the driving force of the web. We owe a lot to Bob for giving it to us. Plus, even though /. uses a forward slash, it could have been the other way.
Funny, the article that claimed he was 78 mentions that he was born in Febuary, 1920. Now I may not have the best grade in my advanced Calc class, but even I know 2004-1920 != 78.
Mathematics is made of 50 percent formulas, 50 percent proofs, and 50 percent imagination.
...he can read his email from beyond the grave?
Bob Bemer rest in peace - your legacy will live on forever - this text is all ASCII , i am going to use backspace in the end to show how valubale this key is along with Esc key which escapes the program when i need to ... thanks Bob Bemer Rest in peace, you were one of the true pioneer in the computer world which we we really rely on today...you created one of the building blocks for the foundation of the internet and technological future...thank you and rest in peace
There must be people out there with a bit of talent willing to have a crack at this!
First, considering the vast amount of code that was changed to ensure that nothing happened, the fact that nothing happened only show sthat somebody did their job correctly.
Second, a lot did, in fact, happen. A hell of a lot of code out there failed when rollover occurred. Nothing critical happened because that code was known to be critical and was thoroughly tested prior to the rollover.
Third, Russia and other countries are not full of fools, you know. They spent quite a lot doing Y2K related changes also. You're making unwarrented assumptions.
I grant you that the media frenzy was stupid, but that's the media. At one point I saw some media jack-off claiming that elevators would plummet to the ground, killing those trapped inside and causing major property damage and so forth. Let's be freakin' realistic. Nothing as silly as that would happen because embedded systems like that don't often depend on the frickin' date to work properly. The real risks were in financial software, for the most part. Stuff that did depend on date. And most of it was fixed before the problem happened.
Thus nothing happened because that was the desired outcome, and the reason we spent so much money in the first place. If something major had occurred, you'd have a real reason to bitch about the money that was spent, wouldn't you?
- Give a man a fire and he's warm for a day, but set him on fire and he's warm for the rest of his life.
Now I know who is to blame for letting microsoft use backslashes in path names.
Our programmers spent an enormous amount of time updating code which certainly wouldn't have worked after the date change. A lot of applications the University relies on would have failed had that work not been done.
Hoax? I don't think so.
More recently, OpenAFS experienced a January 10, 2004 bug (when UNIX time reached 2^30). The election mechanism broke, so servers stopped synchronizing databases, which meant that no new volumes, users or groups could be created. It turned out to be a wrong bitmask in one place, so it was easily fixed.
Y2K would have been far, far worse than this if the problem had not been pointed out ahead of time.
"Computer pioneer Bob Bemer, who published Y2K warnings in '70s, dies at 78" ....
"has died after a battle with cancer. He was 84."
2nd paragraph contradicts the first...
Acaila
Growing Old is Inevitable; Growing Up is Optional.
he forgot to include the "any" key on the keyboard though, and i've been looking for it for years
intellectual property law is philosophically incoherent. it is your moral duty to ignore it or sabotage it
Just for the record, I would like to predict that on Jan 1, 10000 much of the software currently in existence will malfunction unless it is modified to handle 5 digit years. Bemer made his prediction 29 years in advance. I'm making mine 7996 years in advance. So there! :-)
As recently as a month ago, "He was on the computer every day," Teeler said Wednesday. "He is a man who literally worked just about every day until he died. He felt at home sitting in front of a (computer) screen."
Do you people think he knew about Slashdot? Maybe he actually had an account and got involved with the story discussions. For all you know, he may have been a regular comment and story submitter on this site and nobody will notice his disappearance. Just a thought.
I just heard some sad news on talk radio - COBOL standardizer/Father of ASCII Bob Bemer was found dead in his Texas home this morning.
Why is this marked Interesting? Hello, mods?
This is obviously a takeoff on the "Stephen King was found dead.." troll post.
EBCDIC to ASCII was as big a step as ASCII to Unicode. I hope that Bob's next step is even bigger. May he join that big computer in the sky and have restful NOOP's;
from my (limited) COBOL days-
CLOSE mName-# BobBemer
Thanks Bob.
~8^]
It comes down to not giving a shit about things years in the future in order to satisfy immediate needs or desires.
Well... not exactly. In 1971 (or in 1981 for that matter), computers didn't have a lot of memory. Writing code with 2-digit years could save what was then a lot of memory, and I'd bet that most of the programmers figured that their software would either be obsolete or re-written by the time 2000 came around. For the most part, they were right.
He surely can't have been the only one to predict the Y2K issue, however he was probably one of the only people, back then, that actually cared. I constantly hear the argument "ah well, they'll not be using it in x years time, so we can forget about that; it's not an issue".
Well, it was! Now, what happens when the number of seconds since 1970 rolls over the maximum digit for an int?
It figures that his age across the year 2000 would end up being miscalculated by someone ... or something.
now we need to go OSS in diesel cars
And here I thought the reason why IBM continued to use EBCEDIC for so long was due to a case of not invented here syndrome.
Yahoo and Microsoft hit their all-time highs during the week of Y2K, and never recovered since.
Anyone who says the Y2K problem wasn't real, hasn't been following tech stocks.
the spammers would have a field day. It would just be wrong for a dead man to recieve email with the headline: "New \/i@kra will keep you hard as a rock for up to 3 hours!"
That's right. All your base.
And using 2 digit years was a perfectly acceptable solution for the time.
The only serious mistake they made was not in using 2 digit years, but in failing to create sufficient abstraction around the concept of a date that it was not possible to change the underlying implementation of a date without being forced to rewrite the software which was dependant on it. Data conversion would probably still have been required, but that could have been automated.
Of course, if they had done this in the first place. COBOL programmers wouldn't have been able to demand nearly as much of a salary as they did in the late 90's. Hmm... I smell a conspiracy. :)
File under 'M' for 'Manic ranting'
Or so say the doomsayers. JohnTitor.com
Something about fixing legacy machines in 2038 or something.
That's right. All your base.
''Don't drop the first two digits. The program may well fail from ambiguity in the Year 2000.''
He wrote this in his article "Time and the Computer" way back in the 70's.
fifteen jugglers, five believers
> More interesting is that he predicted the Y2K bug all the way back in 1971!"
which has not happened.
War doesn't prove who's right, just who's left.
What a shame that something with such a powerful influence for good (as an escape for special characters) could be perverted and made so powerfully evil (as a directory separator under DOS/Windows).
Use Ctrl-C instead of ESC in Vim!
So he invented the escape, but who invented the Meta-X key-combination?
One big problem was that the COBOL libraries people were using weren't updated for Y2K until the late 80s -- by the time which many of the systems were in maintenance mode.
The other issue was that IBM was dying in the early 90s. Many shops were planning to replace their mainframes with Y2K-compliant and cheaper Unix systems. Many succeeded, but others failed and ended up fixing Y2K issues at the last minute on systems that were supposed to be offline by Y2K.
For a moment I thought he had something do with the backslash that separates directories in M$, the one they got changed from the frontslash so as to cause confusion between a frontslash and backslash (I know many Windoze lusers who call these backwards) and introduce terms such as reverse-backslash.
No, this was the good guy. What a relief.
I recently, from about 1 1/2 years ago, until a couple of months ago, had the pleasure to exchange e-mails. He was very easy going, and responded to every one of my e-mails, even when they weren't that important. Even though I didn't know him past the history on his website, the way he treated me, a complete stranger, tells me that there was something special about him, past his "father of ASCII" title.
It is dangerous to be right on a subject on which the established authorities are wrong. - Voltaire
I think if they included an abstraction layer around the concept of a date, they'd use up more than the two bytes they were trying to save.
Slashdot would not have existed in its current form without the backslash. There may have been the web, but no /. would exist. Perhaps dashdot, or dotdot, but no slashdot.
Yeah, yeah, yeah. The story is a dupe, the topic is boring, the facts weren't checked. WE GET IT!!
That abstraction layer would only have a single instance... it wouldn't need to be stored with each and every date.
File under 'M' for 'Manic ranting'
Indeed, old RPG payroll programs would have generated a lot of anger and confusion on paypay in my area, as a lot of the plants and factories still use AS/400's...
42
09F91102 no, 455FE104 nope, F190A1E8 uh-uh, 7A5F8A09 that's not it, C87294CE no. Ah! 452F6E403CDF10714E41DFAA257D313F.
From what I remember, it cost the United States 100 BILLION dollars (Dr. Evil's plan?) to fix.
On another note, there was only one known death directly related to the Y2K bug. It was a Japanese programmer who was assigned to fix a crapload of code that wasn't Y2K compliant. He commited suicide.
Not sure if the second story is true, but it makes for a good computer story for my non-computer friends !
And so I... predict the Y10K bug! Sadly enough, I'd bet we'll have the same problem in year 10000... (but it will come handy to push the economy)
That's all I have to say, mod accordingly.
Here is a guy who imagined amazing things and contributed to the start of the computer revolution, and yet.. What does slashdot users do? ATTEMPT to think up witty and STUPID remarks to get themselves a nice "5 FUNNY" remark in their posts. Get a grip. Here is a great icon that has passed on. Why don't you take a moment to admire what he has done instead of being a total fuck? C
What I'd like to know is who the a__hole was that decided to use the \ as a directory separator in MS-DOS, which was passed along to Winblows.
*It's not what you can do for the Dark Side but what the Dark Side can do for you!*
He was the father of ASCII
He was the father of COBOL
First published the time-sharing concept
First predicted the Y2K problem
Original paper on ESCape charecter
fifteen jugglers, five believers
Prior to the late 1990's, it was common practice to write the year as just two digits. And no, I'm not talking about in computer programs. I mean in documents and handwriting. You could write a check and give it a date like 1/2/85 and that would be accepted. Everyone did this. If you are writing a log of an activity, you used a two digit date. If you are keeping a ledger, you used a two digit date. Therefore I don't accept the claim that storage savings was the primary drive behind keeping only two digits for the year. If you wanted to save bytes that tightly, you shouldn't even be writing out the date in inefficient ascii form anyway. It would be done as an integer. Doing that, you can store a date in three bytes - a byte int for the month, a byte int for the day of the month, and a byte int for the offset since 1900. That would have saved 3 bytes more than the MMDDYY format, and lasted until the year 1900 + 255 = 2155. Even if you did it using IBM/COBOL's insane "Binary Coded Decimal" format, you could still express all dates from 1900 to 1999 in three bytes that way.
So I don't believe it was done for space savings. It was done merely because it was the same convention people used *outside* computers, and so that's what the programmers were familiar with.
Don't label something "offtopic" unless you know the topic well enough to tell what's on topic.
No-one seems to have mentioned his long jump record, 8.90 metres (29 feet 2.5 inches) at the 1968 Olympic Games in Mexico City.
http://www.britannica.com/eb/article?eu=14105
I am of course joking, rest in pei^Hace
Brocklesby Park Cricket Club
That's nice to hear. Thanks. I worked for Bob while he was Director of Software at Sperry Univac in the 60's. He was a lot of fun: kept calling me "Bub." I found him on the web prior to Y2K as the result of an article reporting that he was suggesting a repair that would not require people to remap existing records. (He wanted to pack the numbers tighter and buy some time.)
I exchanged e-mail with him a few times in the last few years, and I had a chance to acknowledge the inspiration he was for me while he was still around. I don't know that he was around here. When I last exchanged e-mail with him he was frustrated about what it took to maintain his web site. Your contact was more recent. What do you think?
I guess he was a geek at heart. I had produced a fast decimal-to-binary algorithm for a machine that didn't have a built-in converter but addressed in binary and calculated in decimal (makes subscripting hard). He was the only one of his organization that worked it over and took more cycles out of it, and then I took out more using his ideas. He thanked me for giving him a chance to play. He also worried about improving programming languages, establishing software forensics, and making software engineering an activity that exploited reusable piece parts, anticipating components by a good 30 years. He funded Peter Landin and Bill Burge's work on Functional Programming in the US. He also understood about small details, like character sets and escape techniques. With regard to his people, he didn't believe in burning out developers and he thought there was a lot of life to be had outside of the office. I'm pleased to learn that he was active to the end. I'll never forget him. -- Dennis E. Hamilton
he defined the concept of using a special character to "escape" from one character set to another, and proposed to use the backslash for this (which hadn't existed in character sets until then).
the escape key has nothing to do with this!
thanks, slashdot editors, for misinforming people
I think you need a '.' at the end (it was a couple of years ago, and I only did some COBOL for a couple of weeks, so what do I know)
09F91102 no, 455FE104 nope, F190A1E8 uh-uh, 7A5F8A09 that's not it, C87294CE no. Ah! 452F6E403CDF10714E41DFAA257D313F.
Back in about 1964, when I was an engineer and a member of the Cincinnati-Dayton Chapter of the ACM, I was surprised to learn from busines-programming members that 2-digit year representation was being used. We agreed that it had better not be too long before the 2-digit year was replaced in databases.
When Bob's article on the Y2K problem appeared in 1971, I was surprised that nothing had been done. Of course, disk storage space was still quite pricey. I thought that Bob's article would stir things up.
When Y2K finally publicly surfaced in 1998 or 1999, I was stunned that not a damned thing had been done since Bob's definitive 1971 article on the topic.
Last year when I was proofing a local guru friend's in-process book ("The Healthy PC" by Carey Holzman, Osborne-McGraw Hill), we fell into a dispute (which I lost, of course) about his belief that Y2K should be described as a bug (because that's the way it was presented to the public) rather than a temporary disk space-saving convenience which had lived much too long.
I got in touch with Bob Bemer, with whom I had worked in the 1970s and 1980s, about what had actually gone down. He was very gracious and sent me a URL for a definitive newspaper article on Y2K:
http://www.bobbemer.com/weingart.htm
Bob was a very gracious person, as someone else observed, and both pleasant and impressive to work with; I knew somewhat of what he had accomplished.
Predicted it back in '71? That seems like something a smart person would do, shame the rest of us didn't follow up on it before 30 years later.
I was already predicting it no later than '70. Didn't have the cute three-symbol acronym - I was calling it "The Great Bimillenial Computer Date Disaster."
(I was resuscitating a batch processing system in '70 that wouldn't start - turned out to be a 'sanity check' on the date entry. But if I recall correctly I'd been predicting it even before then.)
Nobody listened to ME, either.
(In fact, in the early '80s, while I was consulting, I tried to convince the customer to let me specify date entry in a way that wouldn't blow up in 2000, and was directly ordered not to spend time doing so - because the design life of the system was only 15 years. B-(
I guess I can feel a bit better if Bemer couldn't get the message across either. (Sigh.)
Bantam Dominique roosters crow a four-note song. Once you've heard it as "Happy BIRTHday" you can't NOT hear it that way
And I'm still trying to find the REAL reason several corp. systems I know of failed at rollover. I'm thinking sunspots, but I'm open to the possibility it was swamp gas.
I mean, if he can't escape death who can?
||| I still can't believe Parkay's not butter.
Bob Bemer was a major contributor to the computer industry as a whole and not merely a single corporate. So wouldn't it have been more appropriate and respectful to place the article in Hardware or News rather than relegating it to the IBM section...? Besides the man did work in other companies like RAND Corp. and Honeywell.
Just a passing thought...
Wasn't MS Bob named after this guy?
...i think i'll order a tab.
Bob Bemer ASCII Art Tribute
Hats off to a truly great man.
oh, now COBOL spellchecking...
His point is clear. He says RIP in COBOL way...
Geez...
El Reg says he was 84 (having been born in 1920). Six years is a significant difference, even when you're closer to 100 than 50.
-bZj
.sig
Not.
One intriguing question that occured to me at the time was whether the cost of fixing the problem was worth the damage. I mean Y2k manifested itself in one of two ways...
(1) You get a bill from your phone company for $999,999,999,999.99 for the last quarter; or
(2) If you were cooking a chicken in you microwave at midnight on the 31st of December it would cook for 1 million years.
In either case you are going to notice. I wonder the extent to which all the billing systems that were fixed could not also have been fixed by saying "pay the same amount as last time" and just wear the cost. Probably cheaper than fixing the system and the system would be fine from them on since the year would now be 00. As people so rightly point out billions of dollars were spent fiing the systems, could the same amount of damage ever have been caused?
Just a thought.
"The first thing to do when you find yourself in a hole is stop digging."
''Don't drop the first two digits. The program may well fail from ambiguity in the Year 10000.'' (I'm a Guru)
If you really wanted to honor the man then this is how he would have written it:
X'52', X'49', X'50'
>Here is a guy who imagined amazing things and
>contributed to the start of the computer
>revolution, and yet.. What does slashdot users
>do?
>ATTEMPT to think up witty and STUPID remarks to
>get themselves a nice "5 FUNNY" remark in their
>posts.
>Get a grip. Here is a great icon that has passed
>on. Why don't you take a moment to admire what he
>has done instead of being a total fuck?
Almost with you there, but then again, this is
a site more or less devoted to snarkiness (the
tech stuff is just a backdrop). Maybe
announcements like this shouldn't be posted
here, if snarky comments are going to offend?
I agree that some are pretty tasteless and I
wouldn't have written them myself. But then
again, I don't come here to read what I would
write; I could use a text editor for that.
Anyway, most good men would probably smile
to know that their life's interests were so
significant that a little gentle humor could be
had, using their work as common knowledge.
Given the characters and keys the dude introduced, I'd have imagined you'd come up with:
"Has he been backslashed?"
Or even "escaped".
My faith in you all, not exactly at a stellar level already, just dropped another few points, and is now halfway through to the Earth's core.
One of the most reviled men in computers, the creator of the EBCDIC characterset continues living.
What's that in EBCDIC? Thanks to this man, we no longer have to suffer under its baroque insanity!
Stick Men
More interesting is that he predicted the Y2K bug all the way back in 1971!
Well if you were a programmer who understood how the date structure worked... you too would know about the Y2K bug.
Even when they decided on the "standard" they knew that it would have problems come the turn of the century, but they just thought that a new standard would be made by then and they wouldn't have to worry.
Guess what... It's 2004 and I know of a new Y2K+30something bug! (forget the exact year... 2036?)
I predicted this back in 2000, but this would be the first time I do so in public. After all the fuss, lots of things still only accomodate 2 digits...
vidi, vidi interesting!
See why escape was so key in X3.64? Escape was his pet monkey! Do you know what i say.
^\ = escape (carat symbol is often used from ascii to represent the escape key value) backslash, in ANSI x3.64 = string terminator.
Something else interesting? Instead of saying "ASCII allows the users of computers, which can only interpret numbers, to see a series of numbers as text," they said, "ASCII allows computers, which can only interpret numbers, to see text as a series of numbers." That's like saying the computer is the sentient operator isn't that funny. Haha.
"Stratigraphically the origin of agriculture and thermonuclear destruction will appear essentially simultaneous" -- Lee
Troll or flamebait, maybe, but definitely ON-topic.
"More interesting is that he predicted the Y2K bug all the way back in 1971"
.. All banks knew about the bug then too because when they calculated 30 year mortgages they did not calculate correctly.
B.S.
Why is ASCII so much better than EBDIC? And it was my understanding that big blue took a while to switch to ASCII. Is this true even though someone at IBM helped to invent ASCII?
"O.K. We're going to use 2 digits to store the date, because the first 2 digits are always going to be 19"
"But, that will break in 2000!"
Correct response is:
a) "Oh my god!!! You're a genius! I never would have thought of that if I didn't have you here to think of these things!"
b) "Yeah, I know, but who gives a shit? No one's going to be using this software in 29 years anyway."
-1 Uncomfortable Truth
It turned 48 and 65 into very special numbers for so many of us.
Dan East
Better known as 318230.
So I'll just make myself a pioneer right now, what about the Y10K bug? Hey, I predicted it 7996 years before its coming! ;)
:: he predicted the Y2K bug ::
It wasn't a bug! The people who had to code that way probably raised the issue before he did.
Didn't RTFA, but I'll bet his prediction as to WHEN this bug would occur was vague and off by several years.
Back in the early 80's we both worked for Honeywell. Bob was working on a full screen editor that ran on Honewyell mainframes using TTY based terminals. It was a neat hack.
He was a true geek. He was very focused on whatever he was working on. So non-geeks thought he was difficult.
He was living near Phoenix then and his license plate was ESCAPE. I wondered what the police thougt about that. Perhaps thats why he changed it to ASCII.
R. I. P.
(this all happened over 20 years ago so I may have some details wrong)
Prior to the late 1990's, it was common practice to write the year as just two digits. And no, I'm not talking about in computer programs. I mean in documents and handwriting. You could write a check and give it a date like 1/2/85 and that would be accepted. Everyone did this. If you are writing a log of an activity, you used a two digit date. If you are keeping a ledger, you used a two digit date.
I suspect, once we get into the 2010s and 2020s, that the practice of only using 2-digit years as a shortcut will come back into vogue. During the "zeros" (or "oughts"), it doesn't scan very well.
The paradigm of storing data on punch cards is largely responsible for why dates were stored as individual columns. (Punch cards don't do binary-encoded numbers... you're lucky if you could do packed decimal.) And when storing data on punch cards, once you overflow that 80 column limit for your data set, you've just doubled the number of cards that you have to keep track of. So saving 2-digits here or there makes a whole lot of sense.
Things got better when storage moved to tape, but the punch card thinking still permeated (putting data into column 81 required an additional 80 columns of storage for the 2nd "record").
Wolde you bothe eate your cake, and have your cake?
Which is apparently still a problem under Linux. I ran the script from the page and it rolled over from 2038 to 1901. This is on a Linux 2.4.x kernel, however...I don't know what would happen if it was run under a 2.6.x kernel.
Knowledge is power. Knowledge shared is power multiplied.
Ungrounded Lightning later finished his story:
"Now where was I. oh yeah!
The important thing was that I had an onion tied to my belt, which was the style at the time..."
You may disagree, but to be blunt, you're wrong. -tgd
the Y2K bug in the writer's brain that has surfaced 4 years late
The problem was also management. It's the ties team that buys hardware, they knew this was common practice to better utilize scarce resources and when those resources became less scarce... waited until the last minute and then complained or jumped on the sensationalism bandwagon at the cost of reworking the code. But of course that was back in the heydays of the 80's and 90's when software was a bright spot on the economic landscape. Now that we're really cutting costs... I'm sure software sector management is focused on the long term.
I predict that in the year 32,767, all software will crash that use a short int to store its date field. Similarly, in the year 65,535, all the software that use unsigned int to store the date field will crash. I believe its time to evolve from our primitive data types! what are we? animals?
A morning without coffee is like something without something else.
Dammit. Preview Button, Preview Button, Preview Button.
The Story of Mel was supposed to be linked.
We sincerely apoligize and those responsible for the error have been sacked.
"A great democracy must be progressive or it will soon cease to be a great democracy." --Theodore Roosevelt
Mod my down if you want to do so, because I am about to complain about submission rejection, but for all I care, the editors are not looking carefully at submissions.
I submitted this at lunch time yesterday (that is about 24 hours ago!), as "Bob Bemer, inventor of ASCII, dead at 84", and included a link to Bob Bemer's web page, and some of the things he said helped create, like:
The interesting part in my submission wa how some media covered it. A radio station here (Toronto) said: like "made computers understand letters in addition to numbers" (reference to ASCII) and that he invented "the escape key".
Some of the miswording for the non-tech media can be found in Washington Post article that says: "who helped invent the language used by most of the world's computers to translate text to numbers", and "He helped create the standard measurement of eight bits per byte" and "... escape sequence, which allows a computer to break from one language and enter another".
The Register covers his death with an ASCI Art figure. How appropriate.
2bits.com, Inc: Drupal, WordPress, and LAMP performance tuning.
...that the "10000" in this context shall be pronounced as "one hundred hundred", not "the year ten thousand".
Signed,
Atario
Friday, June Twenty-Fifth, Twenty Oh Four
"A great democracy must be progressive or it will soon cease to be a great democracy." --Theodore Roosevelt
I cannot tell you how irritating it is to talk tech with anyone who uses "backward slash" (it's "backslash"!) and (more irritatingly) "forward slash" (IT'S JUST PLAIN "SLASH", DAMMIT!). Generally these people insist on saying the whole thing every time, and won't accept input from you, either, unless you adopt their brain damage for the duration of the conversation. Feh.
"A great democracy must be progressive or it will soon cease to be a great democracy." --Theodore Roosevelt
...not a single backslash in there.
"A great democracy must be progressive or it will soon cease to be a great democracy." --Theodore Roosevelt
Bob Bemer: Fatal system error. Cannot reboot.
"Love is a familiar; Love is a devil: there is no evil angel but Love." --William Shakespeare ('Love's Labors Lost')
How about "translated to a different file format"?
"Love is a familiar; Love is a devil: there is no evil angel but Love." --William Shakespeare ('Love's Labors Lost')
http://dieoff.org/
Quick! Someone post an ASCII art picture of Bob!
sorry...so sorry.
C'mon, how can we possibly have a story about someone dying without the Netcraft angle?
We may experience some slight turbulence and then...explode. -Capt. Mal Reynolds
The paradigm of storing data on punch cards is largely responsible for why dates were stored as individual columns.
I have a hard time believing that because I doubt the majority of the software that had to be fixed for the year 2000 was actually using punchcards. For example, I doubt that an IBM PC uses punchcards in it's Bios clock. Also, I worked on a system that had inherited the "punchcard" thinking and transferred records as fixed-column text files, and referred to each line of the file as a "card" even though it was stored electronically. And even that system didn't use 80 character limits anymore. The things they called "cards" were hundreds of characters "wide". They certainly didn't think of them in terms of 80 character chunks anymore. And I have a hard time believing many other places still did either. I have no doubt that *some* systems somewhere had still been doing it that way, but certainly not the majority of the ones that needed fixing.
Don't label something "offtopic" unless you know the topic well enough to tell what's on topic.
There was a Y2K bug? Jeeze, I musta missed it! LeX
There was no Y2K bug. Those of us that used only the last two digits of the year to reduce memory and disk consumption, knew that they would not funtion properly past 1999. We never expected that they would remain in use that long. Everyone programming in 1971 knew the limitations of that technique. John