Reshared post from +Brad Acker
Today in History: Grace Hopper recalled to active duty to head COBOL programming effort
On August 1, 1967 — 47 years ago today — Grace Murray Hopper, at age 61, was recalled by the U.S. Navy to help standardize the programming language COBOL for use as a high-level computer language. From August 1, 1967 to 1977, Hopper served as Director of the Navy Programming Languages Group. Although Hopper had retired from the Naval Reserve at the attrition-regulated age of 60, she remained on active duty during this 10-year period by special approval of Congress.Hopper had joined the Navy shortly after the U.S. entered World World II. Because Hopper had a PhD in mathematics from Yale University, she was assigned to the computing program at Harvard University, where the IBM-constructed Mark I computer was being used in computations for the U.S. Navy Bureau of Ships. At Harvard, Hopper became the third person to program the Mark I, and she continued work on the Mark II and Mark III computers — becoming a genuine pioneer in the nascent computer field.
After the war, Hopper left the Navy and became an employee of the company building the UNIVAC I. In this capacity, Hopper developed the first compiler for a computer programming language and pushed the idea of machine-independent programming languages. In 1954, Hopper became the company’s first director of automatic programming.
Sources:
•http://www.computerhistory.org/tdih/
•http://www.history.navy.mil/bios/hopper_grace.htm
•http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Grace_Hopper
•http://www.thocp.net/biographies/hopper_grace.html
•http://www.cs.yale.edu/homes/tap/Files/hopper-story.html
•http://www.encyclopedia.com/topic/Grace_Murray_Hopper.aspx
•http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Harvard_Mark_IImage Credit:
•http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Grace_Hopper#mediaviewer/File:Grace_Hopper.jpg
