George Cogar

Who is George Cogar?

George R. Cogar was the head of the UNIVAC 1004 electronic design team code named the "bumblebee project", and later the "barn project", and co-founder of Mohawk Data Sciences Corporation, a Herkimer, N. Y.-based multimillion-dollar business built largely on his invention of the Data Recorder magnetic tape encoder, which was introduced in 1965 and eliminated the need for keypunches and punched cards by direct encoding on tape. He also founded the Cogar Corporation, where he invented the intelligent terminal—an early forerunner of the modern personal computer—which he called the Cogar C4 or Cogar 4. The Cogar 4 became the Singer 1500 after Singer Business Machines acquired Cogar Corporation. In 1976 International Computers Limited acquired Singer Business Machines, changing the name of the computer to the ICL 1500.

Cogar was last seen September 2, 1983, when a private plane, a Britten-Norman Islander, went down somewhere in British Columbia, Canada.