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Jean Sammet, Co-Designer of COBOL, Dies at 89 (nytimes.com)
theodp writes:
A NY Times obituary reports that early software engineer and co-designer of COBOL Jean Sammet died on May 20 in Maryland at age 89. "Sammet was a graduate student in math when she first encountered a computer in 1949 at the Univ. of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign," the Times reports. While Grace Hopper is often called the "mother of COBOL," Hopper "was not one of the six people, including Sammet, who designed the language -- a fact Sammet rarely failed to point out... 'I yield to no one in my admiration for Grace,' she said. 'But she was not the mother, creator or developer of COBOL.'"
By 1960 the Pentagon had announced it wouldn't buy computers unless they ran COBOL, inadvertently creating an industry standard. COBOL "really was very good at handling formatted data," Brian Kernighan, tells the Times, which reports that today "More than 200 billion lines of COBOL code are now in use and an estimated 2 billion lines are added or changed each year, according to IBM Research."
Sammet was entirely self-taught, and in an interview two months ago shared a story about how her supervisor in 1955 had asked if she wanted to become a computer programmer. "What's a programmer?" she asked. He replied, "I don't know, but I know we need one." Within five years she'd become the section head of MOBIDIC Programming at Sylvania Electric Products, and had helped design COBOL -- before moving on to IBM, where she worked for the next 27 years and created the FORTRAN-based computer algebra system FORMAC.
By 1960 the Pentagon had announced it wouldn't buy computers unless they ran COBOL, inadvertently creating an industry standard. COBOL "really was very good at handling formatted data," Brian Kernighan, tells the Times, which reports that today "More than 200 billion lines of COBOL code are now in use and an estimated 2 billion lines are added or changed each year, according to IBM Research."
Sammet was entirely self-taught, and in an interview two months ago shared a story about how her supervisor in 1955 had asked if she wanted to become a computer programmer. "What's a programmer?" she asked. He replied, "I don't know, but I know we need one." Within five years she'd become the section head of MOBIDIC Programming at Sylvania Electric Products, and had helped design COBOL -- before moving on to IBM, where she worked for the next 27 years and created the FORTRAN-based computer algebra system FORMAC.
Before electronic computers, people used to compute things by hand. Following a well defined algorithm using a mechanical calculator. This was considered semi-skilled women's work, much like typing pools, to keep them employed until they could get married and stay at home and look after kids (when households could survive on a single income).
Unsurprisingly, some of the smarter women started designing the algorithms themselves, often solving tricky mathematical problems. So when electronic computers came along, they were the operators, which included programming. So you see a lot of women in the early days.
Also, during the war, the men were off fighting. Most of the operators at Blechly park were women. But very few, if any, drove the code breaking process.
It's comments like these that keep me reading slashdot after all these years.
You mean comments which seem informative but contain factual errors?
Grace Hopper was married to NYU professor Vincent Foster Hopper from 1930-1945. Hopper was her husband's name; she kept it after the divorce.
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