Significant professional advancement for African-Americans in the machine
division during the 1950s was limited, but James Bostic broke convention.
In 1952 he left the Census Bureau and joined AFSA as a tabulating equipment
operator. A gifted, largely self-taught, programmer and systems analyst,
he became known as the “the Optimizer” during a career that paralleled
the agency’s advancements in computer technology. An early tour in ABNER
1 operations was followed by assignment as a programmer on ABNER 2 and
as a software designer for a mass file storage and retrieval system.
Before retiring in 1986, he led the terminal subsystem development team
for a UNIX-based system.