Slide 36
Slide 36 text
mother of
COBOL
Saturday, March 9, 13
Hopper’s achievements are substantial.
While at the Harvard Computer Lab, she was one of the first programmers of the Mark I. The Mark I was slow - it could only perform 3 operations a second.
She focused on improving efficiency relentlessly. Her interest in increasing efficiency lead her to create the first compiler for the UNIVAC in 1952, despite a cold reception to
the new idea. Until then, all coding
had been done in machine code, a time-consuming and often frustrating activity. The ability to write English words to get the job done was a great
advance in
computer science, although it met with strong resistance from engineers at the time.
During the same time, she wrote papers which would become the foundation for high-level languages. As the director of automatic computing for Remington Rand, her
department released
the first compiler-based programs, which, combined with other work from IBM, became the foundation for COBOL.
Image: http://www.history.navy.mil/photos/images/h96000/h96921.jpg
resource: http://www.linuxjournal.com/article/2657