A more than honorable mention.

The computer pioneer Bob Bemer died Tuesday, June 22nd, 2004, and for those that do not know anything, or much about him, he was very important to your daily life.

The Washington Times had this to say today:

"Robert W. "Bob" Bemer, 84, who helped invent the language used by most of the world's computers to translate text to numbers and who was the first scientist to warn of the Y2K problem, died of cancer June 22 at his home on Possum Kingdom Lake in Texas.

Without the invention of the computer code ASCII, there would be no e-mail, no World Wide Web, no laser printers and no video games. Mr. Bemer, known as "the father of ASCII," created the code in 1961 by assigning standard numeric values to letters, numbers, punctuation marks and other characters.

"We had over 60 different ways to represent characters in computers," Mr. Bemer told Computerworld magazine in 1999, describing the time before the American Standard Code for Information Interchange was created. "It was a real Tower of Babel."

Thank you sir.

--WP