Grace Hopper helps design COBOL
The US Navy recalls a retired officer to build a programming language businesses can read
Quick facts
- Key figure
- Grace Murray Hopper, US Navy
- Year
- 1959
- Full name
- COBOL (Common Business-Oriented Language)
- Design goal
- English-like syntax readable by non-programmers
What happened
The US Navy recalled Captain Grace Murray Hopper, who had already developed one of the world's first compilers in the 1950s, to active duty to help develop a new programming language for business applications. Hopper had worked on the Mark I and Mark II computers at Harvard in the 1940s and had spent the years since building compiler technology that translated instructions written closer to English into machine code. In 1959, she played a central role in defining COBOL (Common Business-Oriented Language), designed with English-like syntax so that businesspeople, not only trained programmers, could read what a program was doing.
Why it matters
COBOL became, in the Computer History Museum's own words, 'probably the most successful programming language for business applications in history,' and decades-old COBOL code still runs banking and government systems today. Its English-like design showed that a programming language did not have to look like mathematics or machine code to be powerful.
How we know
The Computer History Museum's own institutional profile of Hopper and its 'This Day in History' archive both describe her Navy recall, her compiler background, and her role in COBOL's creation.
Sources
- Computer History Museum (This Day in History). August 1: US Navy Recalls Hopper to Head COBOL Effort · Reputable sourcecomputerhistory.org · The domain "computerhistory.org" is on our Reputable source registry. · Link is live and its text matches the event's key terms (Jul 2026)
- Computer History Museum. Grace Murray Hopper · Reputable sourcecomputerhistory.org · The domain "computerhistory.org" is on our Reputable source registry. · Link is live and its text matches the event's key terms (Jul 2026)
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