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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."
Source: https://www.nytimes.com/2017/06/04/technology/obituary-jean-sammet-software-designer-cobol.html?_r=0
-- submitted from IRC
(Score: 2) by VLM on Tuesday June 06 2017, @02:13PM (1 child)
For a good time do some retrocomputing using the Hercules emulator running MVS/360 just like my Aunt was operating at the plant rapidly nearing half a century ago.
The "Stuff" before and after is JCL which tells MVS/360 what to do. Its a gross simplification but its kinda like executables aren't linked, especially not for I/O, until your JCL links them up. Like dynamic library linking but completely by hand. Maybe a crap analogy but a good effort none the less here is hello world as compiles and runs on a MVS/360, and the tabs are all messed up but imagine this looking nicely formatted:
//COBUCLG JOB (001),'COB HELLO WORLD', 00010000
// CLASS=A,MSGCLASS=A,MSGLEVEL=(1,1) 00020000
//HELOWRLD EXEC COBUCLG,CPARM1='LIST,LOAD,NODECK' 00030000
//COB.SYSIN DD * 00040000
001 IDENTIFICATION DIVISION. 00050000
002 PROGRAM-ID. 'HELLO'. 00060000
003 ENVIRONMENT DIVISION. 00070000
004 CONFIGURATION SECTION. 00080000
005 SOURCE-COMPUTER. IBM-360. 00090000
006 OBJECT-COMPUTER. IBM-360. 00100000
0065 SPECIAL-NAMES. 00110000
0066 CONSOLE IS CNSL. 00120000
007 DATA DIVISION. 00130000
008 WORKING-STORAGE SECTION. 00140000
009 77 HELLO-CONST PIC X(12) VALUE 'HELLO, WORLD'. 00150000
075 PROCEDURE DIVISION. 00160000
090 000-DISPLAY. 00170000
100 DISPLAY HELLO-CONST UPON CNSL. 00180000
110 STOP RUN. 00190000
//LKED.SYSLIB DD DSNAME=SYS1.COBLIB,DISP=SHR 00200000
// DD DSNAME=SYS1.LINKLIB,DISP=SHR 00210000
//GO.SYSPRINT DD SYSOUT=A 00220000
// 00230000
One comical cultural difference is on most systems and languages "hello world" outputs the line "hello world" but this particular JCL is dropping all the verbose debugging and compiling logs and intermediate stuff, so there's 1 line of "hello world" and about 999 lines of junk in the output. For example its quite unhappy you didn't link in a "SYSPUNCH" device which is about what it sounds like. And MVS outputs a nifty quota report of how much valuable and expensive computer time you used along with virtual memory stats.
The turnkey MVS project was busier about a decade ago but it never really dies. I think retrocomputing is fun.
(Score: 2) by Nerdfest on Wednesday June 07 2017, @02:10AM
... and the really sad part is that JCL is still used. What a nightmare. I'm of the opinion only one person ever wrote any JCL and everybody else just copied it, commented out a few of the lines and changed a couple of values.