Pioneer Dies"> Pioneer Dies

Bob Bemer, inventor of ASCII, the ESC key, and even the man who named the COBOL programing language died this week at the age of 84. According to Reuters: “He worked for several years for IBM Corp. in the late 1950s and 1960s, and it was there that he helped develop the American Standard Code for Information Interchange. ASCII is a format code used in most computers in the world that allows them to read text as a binary number.

“Bemer is also credited with writing the computer sequence that allows for the “escape” command. The escape command was seen as a major innovation in computing because it allowed users to move backward or sideways in a program.”