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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!"

23 of 348 comments (clear)

  1. That Y2K thingy... by sljgh · · Score: 5, Insightful

    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.

    1. Re:That Y2K thingy... by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 1, Insightful

      Wouldn't a fair few people have picked up on it though? I don't know exactly how each case of faulty software was implemented, but if I was writing code that assumed that 85 meant 1985, I could have told you that once we rolled over to 2000, 00-85 would give -85 instead of the 15 I was after.

      Surely all the programmers knew.

    2. Re:That Y2K thingy... by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 1, Insightful

      Uh, the reason he "predicted" it is because he caused the problem in the first place.

    3. Re:That Y2K thingy... by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 3, Insightful

      Yeah, nobody will be using 30 year old binaries in 2000, err, 2038!

    4. Re:That Y2K thingy... by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 3, Insightful

      You are completely uninformed. A massive amount of money and effort was spent on Y2K problems -- both in replacing systems and repairing them. It was a "big deal", which is why it was solved.

    5. Re:That Y2K thingy... by mcrbids · · Score: 4, Insightful

      Yes I know that in the few cases that it mattered it was fixed, but Y2K was blown way out of proportion by everyone, including some very smart people, it just wasn't that big of a deal.

      I'm sorry, but that's just not true. Y2K went smoothly very much because everybody made sure it did. Many, many very real issues were discovered and addressed. I've seen plenty of the dry runs done, and the results were quite depressing, to say the least.

      After checking everything over, I had my networks and clientelle upgraded where necessary, and only one relatively unimportant system went down. (and it came up fine the next morning)

      Don't think that just because nothing major happened, that nothing major WOULD HAVE happened... lots of good people made sure it went OK.

      --
      I have no problem with your religion until you decide it's reason to deprive others of the truth.
    6. Re:That Y2K thingy... by Brandon+Glass · · Score: 5, Insightful

      I'm sure that all the programmers who worked 20 hours a day to fix many of the problems, and the governments worldwide who allocated billions to fund plans to fix these problems would be thrilled to hear you say that Y2K "just wasn't that big a deal".

      Yes, the problems were blown out of proportion by some people (Gary North, for example), but ignoring the real issues that did exist at the time is just as stupid. I don't think it would have been apocalyptic if these issues weren't addressed as they were, but it would certainly be a huge headache, especially in the financial and business sectors. The amount of private contracts that I and a lot of people that I know got for converting legacy DOS apps to Windows or Linux (the two most common) would probably surprise you. A lot of them didn't even have the source code, so complete re-writes were neccessary.

      --
      Brandon Glass's personal site.
    7. Re:That Y2K thingy... by fuzzix · · Score: 3, Insightful
      Maybe it's because I've never looked at really old code, but I have never understood why someone would only allow for values from 0-99. No matter how you cut it, this will take 7 bits at the minimum. At this point, why not just allow for values 0-127?

      Because that's not the way the year was stored. In my current COBOL job I store the date as 8 character bytes (YYYYMMDD). I have converted programs from back in the day which were 6 character bytes (YYMMDD). This makes it simpler to read and write flat files, and reduces processing overhead for the type of programs commonly written in COBOL.
      COBOL isn't the easiest language to implement bitwise operators so every digit gets a character to itself, so:
      PIC 9(2)
      can hold an integer value from 00 to 99 and is 2 bytes in size. Inelegant, I know - but a job's a job :)
  2. Sounds Like... by Snagle · · Score: 5, Insightful

    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" !!!

  3. Re:What Y2K bug? by QuasiCoLtd · · Score: 5, Insightful

    Lovely troll. I'm sure the thousands of programmers who worked many countles nights and weekends to make sure that "nothing happened" appreciate you writing their work off so lightly. Ever stop to the that the reason nothing happened is because of these people, not despite them?

  4. RIP by burtonator · · Score: 3, Insightful

    Rest\ In\ Peace
  5. Re:82 73 80 by MalleusEBHC · · Score: 4, Insightful

    Please, this man is a geek and deserves to be thusly honored.

    0x52 0x49 0x50

  6. Re:He was 84, not 78 by f1ipf10p · · Score: 5, Insightful

    You complain (rightly so) about one day on Slashdot... imagine how Bob must have felt after 29 years of undestanding the Y2K problem with very few others listening. Not to mention his ASCII vs. EBCDIC struggle within IBM, or the value of higher level languages. \* although I prefer C to COBOL *\ Welcome to the world of the bell curve.

    --
    ~8^]
  7. Re:82 73 80 by belmolis · · Score: 2, Insightful

    Hey there, sonny, even folks my age, and I'm over a generation younger than Bob Bemer, say 122 111 120. The modernizers may say 52 49 50, but Real Programmers certainly don't say 82 73 80.

  8. Goodbye Bob by f1ipf10p · · Score: 5, Insightful

    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^]
    1. Re:Goodbye Bob by Maserati · · Score: 2, Insightful

      Looks like a good day to metamoderate...

      --
      Veteran, Bermuda Triangle Expeditionary Force, 1992-1951
  9. Re:Y2K Prediction by ezHiker · · Score: 5, Insightful

    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.

  10. Re:Y2K Prediction by mark-t · · Score: 4, Insightful
    You are right... the problem was memory.

    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'
  11. interesting indeed... by glMatrixMode · · Score: 2, Insightful

    > 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.
    1. Re:interesting indeed... by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 1, Insightful
      which has not happened.

      Because smart people like him did something about it.

  12. Re:Slashdot by pe1chl · · Score: 2, Insightful

    And without Microsoft, there would not be so many people who believe that '/' is the backslash character, and that '\' and '/' are somehow equivalent.

  13. Asshats.. by cepheusfilms · · Score: 3, Insightful

    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

  14. Re:Math is fun by CountBrass · · Score: 3, Insightful

    The article got it right: Our beloved slashdot editors didn't RTFA (or even the headline which contained his age) before posting the story!

    --
    Bad analogies are like waxing a monkey with a rainbow.