Lieutenant Grace Hopper reports to a Harvard basement in July 1944 and is told to have the arc tangent coefficients by Thursday. She stayed five years, then spent the 1950s telling managers that a computer could be addressed in something close to English, because it only had to translate the sentence and did not have to understand it. Her FLOW-MATIC became the model for COBOL, written in a New York hotel suite by a committee that included Jean Sammet. Most of the world's money still moves through it.
This chapter has not been serialised yet. It will appear on Substack first, and this page will carry its opening when it does.
- In this chapter
- Grace Hopper, Howard Aiken, Jean Sammet, Mary K. Hawes, Charles Phillips, Bob Bemer
- The idea it builds
- The compiler: a program that translates a notation people can read into instructions a machine can run, whatever its make.