Robert William Bemer (February 8, 1920 – June 22, 2004) was a computer scientist best known for his work at IBM during the late 1950s and early 1960s.

[2] He served on the committee which amalgamated the design for his COMTRAN language with Grace Hopper's FLOW-MATIC and thus produced the specifications for COBOL.

[1] In 2000, Bemer claimed to have proposed the term octet (rather than Werner Buchholz' byte) while heading software development at Cie. Bull, France, between 1965 and 1966.

[6] Acting in an advisory capacity, Bob and Honeywell employees Eric Clamons and Richard Keys developed the Text Executive Programming Language (TEX).

Bob Bemer maintained an extensive collection of archival material on early computer software development at www.bobbemer.com.