Word: cobol
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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Retired Rear Admiral Grace Hopper, developer of COBOL, the most widely used computer business language, at Trinity College, Washington: There's always been change, there always will be change . . . It's to our young people that I look for the new ideas. No computer is ever going to ask a new, reasonable question. It takes trained people to do that. And if we're going to move toward those things we'd like to have, we must have the young people to ask the new, reasonable questions. A ship in port is safe; but that is not what ships...
...found a moth in the machine. "From then on," she recalled, "whenever anything went wrong with a computer, we said it had bugs in it." After the war, told she was too old for active duty, she went to work on UNIVAC, the first large commercial computer, and created COBOL, the breakthrough computer language that made the machines accessible to non-mathematicians. She was recalled to active duty in 1967 at age 60. Now 79 and a rear admiral, Hopper is philosophical about the Navy's early slight. "It's just as well to be told...
...People think you have to know how to speak Pascal to get along at Dunster. Well, it's just not true! (Cobol or binary are helpful, though.) There is a little bit of the science-math stereotype, but no one type is prevalent here...
...effort suffered a setback last week. IRS officials canceled a contract for $73 million worth of new computers and software to be supplied by Virginia-based Computer Systems & Resources, after a Government review panel found that the equipment had serious deficiencies. For one thing, the system's mastery of COBOL, a computer language widely used in the Government, did not meet federal standards. The panel also concluded that the system would probably cost $101 million, instead of the $73 million estimated by the Virginia company...
...because it is easy to learn and use. More difficult to master, but more precise, is Pascal, named for the 17th century French mathematician. The language Ada, after the Countess of Lovelace, is the standard of the U.S. Department of Defense. Grace Hopper, one of the pioneer programmers, created COBOL (COmmon Business-Oriented Language), which is the most widely used programming language for mainframe computers...