Today in 1967, The US Navy recalled Grace Murray Hopper to active duty.
From 1967 to 1977, Hopper served as the director of the Navy Programming Languages Group in the Navy's Office of Information Systems Planning and was promoted to the rank of Captain in 1973. She developed validation software for COBOL and its compiler as part of a COBOL standardization program.
The programing language COBOL (COmmon Business-Oriented Language), first designed in 1959, extended Hopper's FLOW-MATIC language with some ideas from the IBM equivalent, COMTRAN. Hopper's belief that programs should be written in a language that was close to English (rather than in machine code or in languages close to machine code, such as assembly languages) was captured in the new business language, and COBOL went on to be the most ubiquitous business programming language of the time.
Hopper, who earned a PHD in mathematics from Yale University in 1934, made many major contributions to computer science throughout her very long career, including what is likely the first compiler ever written. She is credited with popularizing the terms “computer bug" and “debugging” after her colleagues working with the Harvard Mark II computer in 1947 found a moth which had fallen into a relay of the computer and stopped its operations.
When she retired from the Navy in 1986, at age 79, she was a rear admiral as well as the oldest serving officer in the service. Hopper has made many choice observations about the new profession she helped establish. Among them:
Programmers… arose very quickly, became a profession very rapidly, and were all too soon infected with certain amount of resistance to change.
Life was simple before World War II. After that, we had systems.