Friday, June 25, 2004

Programming pioneer Bob Bemer dies at 84. ASCII, ESC, /, COBOL, Y2K, RIP By Ashlee Vance . [The Register] This was a great article, loved reading about Bob Bemer. And I definitely followed the links to Bob's personal history website. I rank him right up there with Alan Kaye and Doug Englebart in terms of his future-sightedness. Others would probably say he was less visionary than a business man, pragmatic type. He definitely was able to move in the corporate atmosphere WAY better than most visionary types. By far the biggest contribution was driving the ASCII standard and seeing that having computers just being capable of communicating with one another with a common character set, that was his vision. Nobody else in the industry of selling iron to corporations gave a rat's ass whether or not any computer was able to share a character set with any other computer. And IBM was one of the few companies who saw backward compatibility as a value-add. But, Bob saw even farther and due to some of that foresight I would hazard a guess that ARPAnet benefit from ASCII, Unix benefited from it, as did the IBM PC. All ASCII character sets. And what about EBCDIC? Left to the shit-pile of time I'm afraid along with all those old fogey MVS sysadmins just hoping praying they hit retirement before their app gets migrated to Unix. 10:47:10 PM    comment []