Robert William Bemer (February 8, 1920 – June 22, 2004) was a computer scientist best known for his work at IBM during the late 1950s and early 1960s
He worked with Grace Hopper and others to invent COBOL, a programming language that was much easier to read and use than ones invented previously.
In 1960, Bob worked with Hugh McGregor Ross and others, to define the ASCII code. He added the ESCape character (and the escape sequence), / and { } and is sometimes known as The Father of ASCII. He wrote "No global intercommunication can be effective without a common language"2
He was also important in the development of the principle of timesharing, "getting many people to use one computer at the same time."2
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1 Image of Bob Bemer by Source (WP:NFCC#4), Fair use