ITE 221 - Fall 2012 - Chapter 3

The chapter describes numbering systems and their use in data representation; compares and contrasts various data representation methods; describes how nonnumeric data is represented and describes common data structures and their uses.

http://www.bobbemer.com/ASCII.HTM

Bob Bemer was a man ahead of his time.  He was working for IBM in the early 1960’s and realized that computers would eventually get involved in communications.  He foresaw the need that machines would eventually need to “talk” to machines. He was a major force in the creation of ASCII.  He pushed for things like making major proposals for content and form; writing many articles about ASCII; forcing the U.S. standard code to be identical to the international code and creating the program of work for the standards group evaluating it.

He also realized that what he was working on was just of subset of the world’s alphabets and symbols.  He also developed the universal switching concept, which is the basis for computer networking today.  He did this by placing the Escape key in ASCII and its alternatives. 

It can be said that Mr. Bemer is the founder of the Internet, not Al Gore, because of the switching concept he developed.