My favourite language, COBOL was based very much on Grace Hopper's philosophy. Grace Hopper joined the Naval Reserve in 1943. By the end of the war, Hopper was working on the Harvard Mark II computer. It was in this machine that the first actual "computer bug" was found: a moth which shorted one of the 17,000 relays in the machine.

She then helped to develop COBOL. It was Grace Hopper's idea that programs could be written in a language that was close to English rather than in machine code (or languages close to machine code such as assembly language), which is how it was normally done at that time. In the 1970s, she pioneered the implementation of standards for testing computer systems and components, most significantly for early programming languages such as FORTRAN and COBOL.

Grace Hopper became the first woman to be elected Distinguished Fellow of the British Computer Society in 1973, being the first American elected to this honour.

Cobol has survived extremely well, and it is still very much in existence, even now. The reason is that COBOL has successfully kept up with every new trend in IT. It has been steadily enhanced, by adding in structured programming constructs, allowing embedded SQL, object oriented facilities and then finally becoming available on PCs. To this day, I don't know why anyone uses anything else. Cobol code is very 'self-documenting', particularly if you set your code out neatly, with good indentation and comments. A good Cobol Program is a pleasure to read.

Pioneers of Usability

Some other, less well known pioneers of usability were women. Betty Holberton and Jean Bartik headed the all-female team of programmers for the original Eniac built in 1945. The ENIAC was designed and built to calculate artillery firing tables for the U.S. Army's Ballistic Research Laboratory

Convinced that computers needed to be made easier to program and operate in order to become effective and widely used tools, these women introduced a number of innovations to improve the usability of early machines. Bartik collaborated with mathematician Adele Goldstine to make the Eniac easier to reprogram by reworking it to function as a stored program machine. Holberton, highly concerned with what she referred to as 'human engineering', later developed the first primitive assembly language for Univac, basing it on the radical human-oriented scheme of mnemonic op-codes. In her efforts to make the Univac friendlier to its users (the programmers and operators), she designed the control panel with what was to become an all-but-universal feature of modern computer interfaces - a numeric keypad next to a typewriter keyboard. [source: Petzinger, 1996].

Hopefully women entering British IT will continue this fine tradition of championing the cause of usability.