She was a Captain at the time. There was 3 committees set up to define a 3rd generation language for use in business, Fortran had been created in 1957 for use in scientific work. She was on the short term committee....the other two committee's never met, the short term committee created COBOL _very_ quickly, and it represented a huge advance, now you could write a business program and have it run on different makes, or even different models of computer, without having to rewrite it in Binary or machine code each time. She also found a moth that was stuck in a relay (or maybe a valve) that was causing the computer to produce errors, thus coining the term "Bug" to describe a computer problem. The moth was taped to a sheet of paper along with a brief description. It's available on the net somewhere, so you can see a picture of the original computer bug :-) She is a huge figure in the history of computing Mark -----Original Message----- From: Damien Sullivan [mailto:phoenix at ugcs.caltech.edu] Sent: 01 February 2003 18:15 To: dragaera at dragaera.info Subject: Re: Female Role Models (was: Favorite NON-fiction) On Wed, Jan 29, 2003 at 07:48:42AM -0800, Frank Mayhar wrote: > Admiral Grace Hopper. Helped invent COBOL, among many, many other > things. We had a female Admiral early enough to invent COBOL? -xx- Damien X-)