On this day, August 1st, in 1967 Naval Reservist Grace Murray Hopper was recalled to active duty by the US Navy to help develop COBOL, designed as an easily-readable computer program that would be as machine-independent as possible and run on any computer for which a computer existed with only minor modifications. 

In retrospect it may seem odd that a computer language for business use, rather than for cracking codes or calculating ballistic trajectories, was created at the behest of the US Navy, but at the time computers were largely the preserve of government and the military.

In fact by 1967 the COBOL (standing for (COmmon Business Oriented Language) project was into its eighth year. The Short Range Committee which defined the initial version of COBOL had been established during a two-day meeting held at the Pentagon on 28-29 May 1959. Convened under the auspices of the US Department of Defense, it was chaired by Charles A. Phillips, then Director of the Data Systems Research Staff and attended by about 40 people from three distinct groups - government  (15 representatives from 7 organisations); manufacturers (15 representatives from 10 companies); potential users from a further 10 companies. Grace Hopper, who was among the attendees, already had a good deal of relevant experience which led to her pivotal role in the project and being regarded as "the mother of COBOL". Not only had Grace Hopper had worked on the Mark I and II computers at Harvard in the 1940s, moving on to Remington Rand she created B-0 (Business Language version 0), later called FLOW-MATIC, for the UNIVAC I which was the first commercially available computer in the United States, designed for business and administrative tasks.

Even while working in the emerging computer industry Grace Hopper had remained in the Naval reserve. Indeed she had applied to be transferred to the regular Navy at the end of the war but, at 40, she was deemed too old. On reaching 60 years of age in 1966 she had retired with the rank of Commander, but seven months later the Navy realized they couldn't do without her and she was asked to return to active duty to take on the job of standardizing the Navy's use of languages and was promoted to Captain.

The Infographic below, which was contributed by Rebecca Hill on the occasion on the 110th Anniversary of Hopper's birth, provides a timeline of the career that led to her being nicknamed "Amazing Grace". It reveals that she retired for a second time at age 65 and was again called back! She retired for the last time at the age of 79 in 1986 with the rank of Rear Admiral - Lower Half.

COBOL meanwhile is so deeply entrenched into business and commerce that it continues to be used and is still going strong in a surprising range of organizations. Last year it even re-entered the Top 20 of the TIOBE Index.  For the reasons why, like its creator, it refuses to retire, see COBOL Turns 60, Still Won't Die.

(click infographic for larger version)

For even more see Grace Hopper - The Mother of Cobol in our history section.

Related articles:

Computer Languages by committee - the 1960s

Grace Hopper - The Mother of Cobol

Grace Hopper and the Invention of the Information Age (Book Review)

COBOL Re-enter TIOBE Index

COBOL Turns 60, Still Won't Die

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