Septuagenarian computer pioneer leaves retirement to fix Y2K bug

BOB BEMER WAS COMFORTABLY RETIRED IN Arizona when he started hearing the panicky chattering about the Year 2000 bug and how a computer-assisted apocalyse would be upon us when the calendar changes from 1999 to 2000.

The more he heard, the angrier he became.

That's because the man known as the father of the computer language ASCII text, the universal standard for computer characters, kept hearing about how early programmers like himself were to blame for using a two-digit designation for the year instead of four digits.

"Everything I saw was just wrong," he says. In fact, he had anticipated what has become known as the Y2K predicament back in 1979. No one was listening then.

So instead of sitting in the desert and seething, he decided to do something.

Bemer, who at 78 has seen the better part of the 20th century, had come up with a solution for the 21st. He moved to Richardson. where he found the programmers he needed, perfected his Bigit (rhymes with digit) Method solution, developed the software--Vertex 2000--to apply his solution, and formed BigiSoft (pronounced BIDG-eh-soft) to sell it.

His point is that everyone is looking in the wrong place for Y2K bugs, and he should know. He is responsible for at least 15 technological innovations, including the ESCape sequence, the switching mechanism for all computer-controlled communications, and the term COBOL for the world's most prominent mainframe computer programming language, which he also helped develop.

His Vertex 2000 program goes after the object code, rather than the source code, on which current efforts to fix the bug are focused. Think of the object code this way: If you are at the United Nations listening to a speech in English, and you speak English, you'll understand what the speaker is saying. If you don't speak English, you listen through a translator. A computer's compiler is the translator, and what comes out of the compiler is the object code. The object code is what tells the computer how to run programs.

The process is complicated, but so far, his solution seems to work.

"I've been testing it with all the applications we have here, and it has worked," says Maricarmen Arredondo with Advanced Computer Technology, a consulting firm in Puerto Rico. She says that during testing, she was able to complete a project in one week with the Vertex 2000 program, while a team of programmers was still working on the problem three months later.

"If you know the applications are big enough, and you know you're not going to be able to finish converting them, put in Vertex," she says. And afterwards, make the conversions calmly without any pressure, or buy new software. "Vertex is a solution, so you don't have to panic."