> In May 1961, an IBM engineer, Bob Bemer, sent a proposal to the American National Standards Institute (ANSI) to develop a single code for computer communicati

> In May 1961, an IBM engineer, Bob Bemer, sent a proposal to the American National Standards Institute (ANSI) to develop a single code for computer communication. ANSI created the X3.4 Committee, Hmm. That seems to leave out quite a bit. Eric Fischer (an HN'er) wrote "The Evolution of Character Codes, 1874-1968", available from https://archive.org/details/enf-ascii/page/n23/mode/2up https://archive.org/details/enf-ascii/page/n23/mode/2up . In it, Eric writes: > By 1955, Herbert Grosch had become sufficiently concerned about the growing incompatibility of character codes that he urged the attendees of the Eastern Joint Computer Conference to ‘‘register common codes so that ... and > The American Standards Association (ASA) got involved in character code standardization on August 4, 1960, when it created the X3.2 subcommittee for Coded Character Sets and Data Format. Bemer's letter in 1961 therefore doesn't seem to have been a proposal to develop a single code, because that was in the works. Rather: > The March 8-9, 1961 meeting of X3.2 finally led to a code (based on a proposal by Robert W. Bemer, Howard J. Smith, and F.A. Williams) that nearly everyone could agree upon—but there is some dis-agreement about exactly what it was that was agreed. And that's in March 1961, well before May 1961. Indeed, May 1961 is when Bemer et al. wrote the CACM article "Design of an Improved Transmission/Data Processing Code" - http://www.ed-thelen.org/comp-hist/ImprovedDataProcessingCode_BemerSmithWilliams_CACM_May1961.pdf http://www.ed-thelen.org/comp-hist/ImprovedDataProcessingCod... .