Fergus Cassidy

Letter man

"The US government is preparing for possible violence from cults, guerrillas, hate groups and end-of-world-fearing".

IT IS the last few months of 1999. The headlines are screaming with doom-laden predictions. Planes could fall from the sky, power stations could shut down and bank accounts could empty.

It's not as if people needed an excuse to fear the millennial wrath of the gods but whether the threat was hyped or real, Y2K did draw attention (all too briefly) to the risks and rewards of a computer-driven world.

Hollywood hysteria aside, the Y2K time bomb had been ticking since the 1960s. One man in particular spent his life's work trying to fix it. Bob Bemer knew how to do that and more. He spent an inordinate amount of time and energy dedicated to explaining to the world his vision for the purpose of technology. Right up to the time of his death, two weeks ago.

Born in 1920, one of Bob Bemer's first jobs was as a senior set designer for RKO Pictures. He became a computer programmer in 1949 and worked for the likes of Lockheed, IBM, General Electric and Honeywell. He will be remembered as an extraordinary programmer and a lot more.

Bemer was the first person in the world to publish warnings about Y2K. Computers were using two digits to indicate the calendar year when four were needed to do that correctly.

In the February 1979 issue of Interface Age Bemer wrote: "There are many horror stories about programs, working for years, that died on some significant change in the date. The program may well fail from ambiguity in the year 2000".

But his first warning came in 1971 in an editorial he wrote for the Honeywell Computer Journal under the heading 'What's the Date'? That was his response to a US government ruling that two-digit years would become the preferred option for federal agencies, starting 1 January 1970.

Bemer fought on for change regardless. He and others mustered the support of dozens of technical societies and appealed to US president Nixon to declare 1970 the National Computer Year.

When lobbying, believed to be from the defence department, kept the group out of the Oval Office, Bemer turned to presidential science advisor, Edward David. David went to Nixon who listened and then asked for help fixing his TV set!

Bemer looked back at that period and Nixon's fall from grace: "I felt I had some satisfaction from Nixon for refusing to sign a proclamation for the National Computer Year I had set my heart on, and believed was so crucial to the country". He had hopes that an International Computer Year would follow up on the US effort and widen the debate on computers and technology.

Among the goals he strived for was "to consciously put computers in service to international goals, to increase public understanding of the role and potential of computer usage, and to accent the role of the computer as servant by more humanisation of applications and usage".

Another was "to ensure that public safety and welfare are considered adequately when computers are integrated directly into human activity".

This constant life theme of technology serving humanity is also quite obvious on his web site: "We will arouse and admonish the so-called 'computer scientists', trying to persuade them that they have a very civic duty to mankind, because computer software is now, undeniably, running the world for us".

As news of his death spread around the web, his Y2K work was mentioned in the many tributes. It was hard though, if not impossible, for most of them not to concentrate on his 'Father of ASCII' title. For that is probably what he will be remembered most for.

ASCII (pronounced as-key) is shorthand for American Standard Code for Information Exchange and is an international standard for representing letters in the alphabet, numbers and control codes. All 127 of them. B, for example, is 66. R is 82.

Bemer was the driving force behind ASCII, contributing 11 characters himself including the backslash. He recalled that in 1960 "we had over 60 different ways to represent characters in computers. It was a real Tower of Babel".

Bemer has said that "it is not correct to say that I created ASCII. To say this insults many people who dedicated years of their lives working out compromises between dozens of existing codes for the resultant single code. I have never demurred at being called the 'Father of ASCII', as it is the 'mother' who creates".

In March 2003, he was awarded the highly prestigious Computer Pioneer Award by the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers. The citation read: "For meeting the world's needs for variant character sets and other symbols, via ASCII, ASCII-alternate sets, and escape sequences".

As if that wasn't enough, Bemer also helped create another important computer language standard in the late 1950s and named it Cobol (Common business oriented language). He later satirically commented: "Sometimes I regret creating Cobol. It allowed lots of people that are less competent and responsible than they should be to get into the computer field".

Bob Bemer was a prolific computer user up until a few weeks before he died. His stepson, Glen Teeler, spoke of him as "a man who literally worked just about every day until he died. He felt at home sitting in front of a screen. He never got the coding out of his system. He was a coder until he couldn't code any more. He lived it and breathed it".

He sure did.