Fun Fact # 298 The Cabal of COBOL
Fun Fact # 298
The Cabal of COBOL
The bombing of Pearl Harbor was a tragic event, but left in its wake an opportunity for women to join the military and earn doctorates in numbers that wouldn't be seen again until the mid 1980s. One of these Women was Admiral Grace Murray Hopper. Not only would she write the program to the first Electro-mechanical computers --IBM’s Mark I-- but also assisted in the making of the Mark II and III. It was here where she encountered a Mark II that had shorted out from a Moth flying into the machine and coined the terms “Computer Bug” and “Debugging” while she was repairing the device.
More importantly though she is the reason computer languages changed to being written with letters rather than numbers greatly expanding computer literacy.
Lastly, she helped invent the computer language COBOL which was the first computer language designed for businesses and proved so successful that 63 years later it still runs most Mainframe computers (39,395 companies still use Cobol including: Google, Amazon, Yahoo, and Bing).
