Jon Bosak - Bob Bosak

Bob Bosak

Jon Bosak's father, Robert Bosak (1925–1987), began the family's long involvement in the computer industry in 1947 when he went to work on the first computer on the west coast of the USA. He joined RAND in 1948 to work on analysis and programming of scientific problems. In 1951, he joined Lockheed Aircraft Corporation, where he organized and directed the Mathematical Analysis Group. For a short time after his divorce in the 1950s, he shared an apartment with Bob Bemer, "the Father of ASCII."

Bob Bosak returned to RAND in 1956 to become head of programming for the Semi Automatic Ground Environment (SAGE), the automated NORAD system that controlled US air defenses from 1959 to 1983 and strongly influenced the design of modern air traffic control systems. He was one of the designers of JOVIAL and principal author of the seminal paper An Information Algebra.