| Bob Bemer |
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Born in Sault Ste. Marie, Michigan , Bemer graduated from Cranbrook Academy in 1936 and took an A.B. in Mathematics at Albion College in 1940 . He earned a Certificate in Aeronautical Engineering at Curtiss-Wright Technical Institute in 1941 . Bemer began his career as an aerodynamicist at Douglas Aircraft Company in 1941 then worked for RAND Corporation from 1951 , IBM from 1957 , and Honeywell from 1974 . He also worked for UNIVAC . He served on the committee which amalgamated the design for his COMTRAN language with Grace Hopper 's FLOW-MATIC and thus produced the specifications for COBOL . He also served on the separate committee which defined the ASCII character codeset in 1960 , contributing several Character s which had not previously been used by computers including the ESCape Character , the Backslash character, and the Curly Bracket characters. As a result he is sometimes known as ''The Father of ASCII''. Other notable contributions to computing include the first publication of the Time-sharing concept and the first attempts to prepare for the Year 2000 Problem in publications as early as 1971 . Bob Bemer maintained an extensive collection of archival material on early computer software development. Bemer died at Possum Kingdom Lake, Texas , after a battle with Cancer . EXTERNAL LINKS
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