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Computer Pioneer Bob Bemer Dies

Posted by CowboyNeal on from the riderless-horse dept.

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!"

21 of 348 comments (clear)

  1. He was 84, not 78 by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Informative

    And I posted this yesterday.

    1. Re:He was 84, not 78 by stuffman64 · · Score: 4, Informative

      Even worse, this seems like a paraphrase of the story I submitted two days ago (rejected, of course).

      Regardless, Mr. Bemer was a true pioneer and champion of the early computer age. He may not have been as famous as some of the bigger guys, but his contributions were significant and still relevant even today.

      In other news, another great computer pioneer, Herman Heine Goldstine, also died. Goldstine helped influence the goverment to fund development of ENIAC.

      --
      --- At my sig, unleash hell.
  2. His website by NearlyHeadless · · Score: 5, Informative

    His website is here. There are a lot of interesting tidbits on his history page.

    1. Re:His website by orkysoft · · Score: 5, Informative

      And if you read that, you'd know he invented the escape sequence, rather than just a key on your keyboard. The website hardly mentions the key, it mentions the concept of the escape sequence. That the ESC key is used to activate terminal escape sequences, or the backslash (which he also introduced into ASCII) is used to activate C-like escape sequences, isn't as relevant as the concept of the escape sequence itself.

      --

      I suffer from attention surplus disorder.
  3. Re:So one might say by canon006 · · Score: 2, Informative

    Or a KDE user.

  4. Some cool stuff can be found here by ErichTheWebGuy · · Score: 5, Informative

    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
  5. Re:The Y2K Bug? by MarkRebuck · · Score: 5, Informative

    The Y2K bug was NOT a hoax. It was a valid problem that was (for the most part) solved in time. Big difference.

  6. Re:What Y2K bug? by sljgh · · Score: 3, Informative

    How many developing countries use computers? Sure a lot of embedded stuff didn't fail, but they weren't programmed to fail either, a microwave doesn't need to know the correct date. In more advanced countries, with vulnerable systems, we exported the patched code, to software we developed, that's why they didn't have to spend so much money on it. Yeah, it was hyped. But a lot of the ensuing nothing was caused by corrections we made.

  7. Re:So one might say by f1ipf10p · · Score: 2, Informative

    No, Bob has been re-IPL'd. Alt-F4 is Windows. Bob was X360 era...

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    ~8^]
  8. Re:That Y2K thingy... by f1ipf10p · · Score: 4, Informative

    And still most people don't realize that the counter from epoch date (Jan 1. 1970) has a roll over flaw too. Seems to me 2038 is the magic year... but I have poor memory recall... I'm sure my recall will be even worse by then...

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    ~8^]
  9. His Exact words on Y2K !! by phreakv6 · · Score: 5, Informative

    ''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
  10. Re:So one might say by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 1, Informative

    ALT-F4 was originally an IBMism

  11. Re:That Y2K thingy... by John+Courtland · · Score: 3, Informative

    If you use BCD, then two digits are only 8 bits. Thus 99 would be 10011001b.

    --
    Slashdot is proof that Sturgeon's Law applies to mankind.
  12. Re:Y2K Prediction by DunbarTheInept · · Score: 2, Informative

    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.

  13. It's escape CHARACTER, not key by karnat10 · · Score: 5, Informative


    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

  14. Re:That Y2K thingy... by Frobnicator · · Score: 4, Informative
    My year 10 computing teacher told us a story about how in the 60s they used a single number to store the year, and when they got to 1970 they were like "wait a sec!"
    Sounds like your year 10 computing teacher needs to take some more history lessons. Many of the groups who first dealt with computers (banks) were hit with the Y2K bug right at 1970, since they couldn't do 30-year loans, and many had already considered the problem. And since these companies counted out memory by the byte (or rented memory by the byte) they certainly wouldn't have been storing years as simple text. If they were, the programmer at the day would certainly have been considered wasteful, and possibly even fired for such practices.
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  15. Re:Sounds Like... by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 1, Informative

    Now it helps to type CONSTANT_NAMES without getting RSI from it.

  16. Re:Not that backslash by Detritus · · Score: 2, Informative
    It wasn't Microsoft's fault, although they could have picked another character other than the backslash.

    Windows was descended from MS-DOS which was a clone of CP/M which was inspired by some old DEC operating systems that reserved the forward slash for command-line options.

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    Mea navis aericumbens anguillis abundat
  17. How Bob would have put it... by gd23ka · · Score: 2, Informative

    If you really wanted to honor the man then this is how he would have written it:

    X'52', X'49', X'50'

  18. Re:Sounds Like... by Jugalator · · Score: 4, Informative

    No, whoever thought up "CTRL-ALT-DEL" is the bastard.

    Hmm... Why?

    It's a perfectly sensible combination since you shouldn't be able to hit the keys accidentally, and are therefore separated from each other.

    But you probably blurted it out because you thought it was a Microsoft innovation. :-P (credit for it goes to David Bradley of IBM)

    --
    Beware: In C++, your friends can see your privates!
  19. Re:Math is fun by iridiumz0r · · Score: 2, Informative

    The article didn't get it right in the headline. Read the big bold bit at the top. It says "Computer pioneer Bob Bemer, who published Y2K warnings in '70s, dies at 78" It then goes on shortly after that to say: "...has died after a battle with cancer. He was 84."