HISTORY AND HERSTORY

To call Grace Murray Hopper “the man who invented COBOL” is tantamount to saying that Henry Ford invented the automobile or that Frank Sinatra invented the croon. I’m sure that the worthy Rear Adm. Hopper would be the first to protest and to point out that many others contributed as much or more to the development of that most-successful computer language, and that it was based upon and would not have been possible without several of its predecessors (especially the FACT language of Honeywell, locally designed by the then newly hatched Computer Sciences Corp.). It certainly did not burst full-blown from the imagination of any one Einsteinian genius.

FRANK LA ROCHE

EL SEGUNDO