Bob Bemer - Early IT pioneer

Mr. Bemer's accomplishments resonate so deeply one almost assumes they have been with us always, snatched out of the ether by a collective consciousness, instead of having been the creation of one man. A short list includes: helped create COBOL (as in "Grandfather of" [1]) coined the words COBOL [2] and CODASYL [3] invented the ESCape sequence created the PICTURE clause helped create and standardize the ASCII character set (as in "Father of" [4]) put the backslash into the ASCII set helped create the 8-bit per byte standard"