| Monday, June 28, 2004 |
 | After the death of Bob Bemer, the inventor of the escape key, which must be the most cruelly mocking button on the keyboard (escape? You can't escape this. You can't escape that your program has crashed. You can't escape your desk. You can't escape your job. You can't escape that your hair is thinning and your waistline thickening. There is no escape. For you, Tommy, the war is over), it's rewarding to look back over his history of computing. Incredibly, Bemer was present at pretty much every major innovation in cmputing ever. Even more incredibly, the history of the development of computing seems to be oddly connected to the history of the horn.
My wife reported that, after settling in, Learson put a hand on her knee and asked "Is there anything I can do for you, honey?" Marion, one of the brashest, replied "Yes, give my husband a raise". A startled Learson asked "Your husband? Who's your husband?" Her reply was "You know - Bob Bemer - he works for you".
It wasn't much more than a week later that Learson moved me out as IBM Director of Programming Standards and shipped me off to Research. Andrus said later that the reason Learson gave to him was that I was giving the store away by cooperating too much with ANSI efforts on ASCII. I was of a different opinion. I thought it was because of the affair in the basement.
Once again we see that, like the torch of Prometheus dfor our primitive cousins, the throbbing horn has done much to shape our society.
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