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 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 built an intelligent terminal—an early forerunner of the modern personal computer—which he called the Cogar System 4 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.

Disappearance

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

Foundations

Cogar and his wife Ann established the Cogar Foundation for the express purpose of awarding grants and scholarships to students of Herkimer County.

Patents

Asynchronous Self Controlled Shift Register
TAPE ERROR INDICATION APPARATUS
ASYNCHRONOUS SHIFT REGISTER WITH DATA CONTROL GATING THEREFOR
Reverse Write and Forward Verify Read of a Variable Length Data Record
APPARATUS AND METHOD FOR CONTROLLING SEQUENTIAL EXECUTION OF INSTRUCTIONS AND NESTING OF SUBROUTINES IN A DATA PROCESSOR
Heating System
Permanent reproductions and formation method therefor
Fluid Shift Flip-Flop
DISPLAY PANELS WITH SELECTABLE INDICATORS
Skew Correction Buffer
Printed Circuit Assembly Apparatus
Phase Modulation System For Reading Particular Information
PRINT CONTROL MEANS FOR HIGH SPEED PRINTER WITH TRAVELING PRINT BAR
ASYNCHRONOUS COUNTING DEVICES
DATA RECORDING AND VERIFYING MACHINE
BACKSPACE MECHANISM FOR A TAPE HANDLING APPARATUS FOR A DATA RECORDER
SYNCHRONIZED SINGLE PULSER
MAGNETIC TAPE READOUT SYSTEM WITH MEANS TO GENERATE ARTIFICIAL SIGNALS
TAPE HANDLING APPARATUS FOR DATA RECORDER
KEYBOARD SPROCKET CIRCUIT
ADDRESS COUNTER STAGE CIRCUITRY