D-FOB-Cohen 29 HERMAN HEINE GOLDSTINE, 90 AND ROBERT W. BEMER, 84 ...

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HERMAN HEINE GOLDSTINE, 90 AND ROBERT W. BEMER, 84 Now that we're more than half a century into the computing age, we have begun to witness the deaths of the first generation of computer pioneers. Last month we lost two of it's most illustrious members, Herman Goldstine and Robert W. Bemer.

Dr. Herman Heine Goldstine, winner of the National Medal of Science, was a mathematician by training who helped the military develop the famous ENIAC system (Electronic Numerical Integrator and Computer). During WWII, Dr. Goldstine served as an Army ordnance mathematician, responsible for the calculation of artillery firing tables. When the War Department began on the top-secret ENIAC, Goldstine was put in charge; some two years and 200,000 man-hours later, ENIAC was realized as a 30-by-60-foot monstrosity that weighed in at nearly 30 tons of computing power.

Following the war, Dr. Goldstine joined the Institute for Advanced Study at Princeton, where his work led to the construction of the "second-generation calculator," another primitive computer built under the aegis of Operation Paperclip's John von Neumann and introduced as EDVAC (Electronic Discrete Variable Automatic Computer).

Then came a 26-year stint at IBM, where he served chiefly as a liaison between academia and the company's research departments. This was followed by retirement and his last position: executive officer of the American Philosophical Society from 1984 to 1997. During his tenure, he attempted to evaluate progress in computer science within the sphere of humanist philosophy.

Six days after Dr. Goldstine's death on July 16 in Bryn Mawr, PA, Robert W. Bemer succumbed to cancer in Possum Kingdom Lake, TX.

Bemer first became interested in computing when doing engineering work on military aircraft for the Rand Corporation after WWII. Though the engineering end of early computing always interested him (the building of room-sized whirring things, as per Dr. Goldstine), he was more drawn to the "artistic" side—and thus began programming flight patterns for aircraft companies before joining IBM in 1955.

There, Bemer worked on encoding human language for use by computers. He invented the American Standard Code for Information Interchange, in which 128 alphanumeric characters are assigned numerical values. Before ASCII, computer manufacturers were forced to develop their own systems, making data exchange virtually impossible. Bemer's invention is universally regarded as the predecessor of the standard that enables the exchange of data on the internet, and it remains the worldwide standard for most computer-based text encoding.

Following this work, Bemer left IBM in an argument over ASCII and joined Sperry Rand's Univac division, where he helped develop yet another language, Cobol, a common language for accounting and business data commissioned by the Defense Department.

In later years, Bemer retired to his interests in chess and music, and to make peace among his five ex-wives. o