Jean E. Sammet, an early software engineer and a designer of COBOL, a
programming language that brought computing into the business
mainstream, died on May 20 in Maryland. She was 89.
She lived in a retirement community in Silver Spring and died at a
nearby hospital after a brief illness, said Elizabeth Conlisk, a
spokeswoman for Mount Holyoke College in Massachusetts, where Ms. Sammet
had earned her undergraduate degree and later endowed a professorship in
computer science.
The programming language Ms. Sammet helped bring to life is now more
than a half-century old, but billions of lines of COBOL code still run
on the mainframe computers that underpin the work of corporations and
government agencies around the world.
Ms. Sammet was a graduate student in mathematics when she first
encountered a computer in 1949 at the University of Illinois at
Urbana-Champaign. She wasn’t impressed.
“I thought of a computer as some obscene piece of hardware that I wanted
nothing to do with,” Ms. Sammet recalled in an interview in 2000.
Her initial aversion was not unusual among the math purists of the time,
long before computer science emerged as an academic discipline. Later,
Ms. Sammet tried programming calculations onto cardboard punched cards,
which were then fed into a computer.
“To my utter astonishment,” she said, “I loved it.”
https://www.nytimes.com/2017/06/04/technology/obituary-jean-sammet-software-designer-cobol.html
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Gabriel Goldberg, Computers and Publishing, Inc. g...@gabegold.com
3401 Silver Maple Place, Falls Church, VA 22042 (703) 204-0433
LinkedIn: http://www.linkedin.com/in/gabegold Twitter: GabeG0
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