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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!"
In Memory Of A True Geek
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)
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.
I see two reasons why code wasn't designed for four-digit years in the 70s:
1. No one thought that their code would still be in use in 20-30 years.
2. It would be inefficient to waste a byte of space per entry. Storage space and memory were both very limited until fairly recently.
LOAD "SIG",8,1
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.
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.
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.
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?
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.
Only if you keep using outdated and poorly engineered OS's and hardware instead of Power Macs which are designed to handle dates through A.D. 29,940
Disclaimer: Y2K was nothing but overblown crap reported on by the uninformed media, and I would not want to be in any way associated with it. I just found it funny that PPC Mac's handle such huge dates.
"I use a Mac because I'm just better than you are."
I have been reading some documents on his site, and this two are a must:
about managers in computer industry (it reminds me of my bosses) and
when it's to cheap for the government.
And talking about ASCII, and (dead) keys, now I know that the ALT Key was pattented by IBM... who (apparently) lost a patent litigation on this issue.
Worth reading!
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!" - it all came down to space - what was the point of storing two or four numbers if you only needed one? it doesnt take much to extend the idea to 2000 for programs written in 1970, except they needed the space and why would their code last so long?
we are now rather spoilt with storage space/bandwidth/etc
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?
My only guess is that this was in systems where you would need to be displaying the last two numbers, so displaying 0-27 for 100-127 would obviously cause a problem. However, it would seem simple to just add your year variable to a constant of 1900 and display the whole 4 digits.
Sure you still run into Y2027 problems, but it's a little better.
Mr. Bemer invented the ESC character to "escape" into an alternative character set, not to interrupt an operation nor to exit a dialog. He once expressed his displeasure at how the world came to know his brainchild.
When living in Arizona, he had "ASCII" on his vanity licence plate.
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
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!!
09F91102 no, 455FE104 nope, F190A1E8 uh-uh, 7A5F8A09 that's not it, C87294CE no. Ah! 452F6E403CDF10714E41DFAA257D313F.
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
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
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...
Bob Bemer ASCII Art Tribute
Hats off to a truly great man.
Text and BCD formats were popular because they were efficient. Binary (integer) formats for date and time required complex conversions for I/O. There was no such thing as the microprocessor. Multiplication and division were usually very slow operations. Many computers implemented them in software, not hardware. The hardware for them was often an expensive option, not a standard part of the CPU. BCD could be converted to/from your favorite character code with simple hardwired logic.
Mea navis aericumbens anguillis abundat
Because none of you can figure this one out...
MS-DOS 1: No subdirectories, so no need for path separation other than by drive letter. Programs that take option switches need a character to mark them as switches. For some reason, '/' was chosen.
MS-DOS 2+: Subdirectories. Now we need path separation. '/' seems like the most obvious choice. But... backwards-compatibility overrules all here, so we go with the sub-optimal '\'.
Horror ensues.
Sorry to burst your bubble, but I suspect your test cases involved standard PC's which was *not* the problem. Most of the real y2k problems (rather than the ones picked up on by the media) involved mainframes running programs written in Cobol - and there were many many examples in the Finance industry. The reason Joe Public didn't notice anything was a) because the serious issues *were* fixed and b) it was never really a PC problem anyway. How do I know? Because I did tech support for a Y2K team in 1999 - no I wasn't a y2k "consultant". But I saw the very real problems that were being worked on and fixed.
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)