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.
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
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.
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?
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.
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.
The Y2K bug was a real problem.
Most of the problem code got fixed (particularly for critical systems) during the years leading up to 2000, so that's why it seems like nothing happened.
I personally had Y2K problems with reports that were generated by a couple of old Foxpro programs that were being used at my company. We had migrated to new software because we new about the Y2K problems with the old software. Sure enough, as of the morning of Jan 1, 2000, we could no longer print historical data out if the old system because it thought the date was 1900. I worked around the issue by rebuilding the reports in Crystal Reports which had a pivot year function.
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.
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.
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
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.
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'
''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.
You forgot the backslash! Anyone else find it earie that the \ is an "escape" character, and he came up with the Esc key as well? ;)
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.
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
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.
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
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
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...
Bob Bemer ASCII Art Tribute
Hats off to a truly great man.
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.
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.
If you really wanted to honor the man then this is how he would have written it:
X'52', X'49', X'50'
One of the most reviled men in computers, the creator of the EBCDIC characterset continues living.
"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
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)
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