Ever since 6th grade I have been fascinated with computers. One of the first things I learned was the ASCII chart (American Standard Code for Information Interchange). I knew that the alphabet started with decimal 65 (letter 'A') and ended with decimal 90 (letter 'Z').
Special characters such as a space was 32 and a carriage return was 13. Ah yes, these numbers were like religion to me and I knew them like the back of my hand for writing BASIC and assembly programs.
So it is with great sadness that I learned today that one of the founding fathers of ASCII has died.
Bob Bemer, a computer pioneer who helped invent the ASCII coding system and also published warnings of the Y2K problem in the early 1970s has died after a battle with cancer.
You can read more about it here:
CNN.com - Computer pioneer dies - Jun 23, 2004
Bob Bemer