Robert William Bemer

Best known as "The Father of ASCII," Bemer made foundational contributions to computing through his work on COBOL and the ASCII character codeset.

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.

Bemer 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, with Hugh McGregor Ross and others, on the separate committee which defined the ASCII character codeset in 1960, contributing several characters 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.