Jon Bosak

He had come to appreciate the power and flexibility of SGML in his days running Novell's (excellent) on-line documentation repository at http://www.novell.com, and had acquired a conviction that HTML was not a suitable base on which to build the next layer of Web infrastructure.

"In a 1999 posting to the xml-dev mailing list,[3] Bray writes: "It is to Jon Bosak's immense credit that he (like many of us) not only saw the need for simplification but (unlike anyone else) went and hounded the W3C until it became less trouble for them to give him his committee than to keep on saying SGML was irrelevant.

"When he stepped down from the W3C XML Coordination Group in 2000, Jon Bosak was given the unusual recognition of having a formal identifier reserved for him: In 2001, Bosak organized the OASIS Universal Business Language Technical Committee to create standard formats for basic electronic business documents.

In 1951, he joined Lockheed Aircraft Corporation, where he organized and directed the Mathematical Analysis Group.

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.