Kevin Willoughby wrote:

In article ,
says...
But don't leave out Admiral
Hopper. She was a major player in getting those electronical
thinkums to do useful work. I'd hate to be in a command bunker
somewhere trying to calculate an incoming missile's impact point by
hand.

??

Hopper is best known for her work in implementing and, especially,
evangelizing COBOL, a language poorly suited to real-time,
physics-heavy programs.

Hopper was involved with computing and computers (as a machine, rather
than a job description) since the beginning. She played a big part in
the Navy's Mark I, II, and III projects, which accelerated the
services acceptance of digital computers as problem solving tools.
She was a problem solver, who saw computers as a tool for easing
people's work first, and as a nifty toy second. (A useful
characteristic in this profession, and all too rare.)
Yes, she had quite a bit to do with COBOL, but that was only one of a
long string of achievements.
She's one of the big reasons that Artillerists are no longer guessing
the firing solution after dragging a tape measure across a paper map.

Those achievements, and the environment that they led to, created an
atmosphere receptive to the next big step, which was:

SAGE was an Air Force/IBM project, using, iirc, machine language.
SAGE was the brainchild of George Valley.
It had nothing to do with predicting missile impact points.
What it _did_ do was automatically identify and correlate radar
returns from several stations (Some reports have claimed that SAGE
got its tracking data by manual input via teletype - not so. Radar
sweep data was digitized and sent over teletype lines, and into the
system untouched by human hands. It was, IIRC, the first application
of modems.). It compared these tracks to known flight plans, and
assigned ranking to the targets. It could instantaneously and
automatically triangulate jamming targets. It could identify
dispersed raids, track a huge number of targets, and compute
intercepts to all of them, then direct the interceptors via datalink.
A SAGE sector also monitored the information and intercepts of all
the sectors around it - if a sector went down during an attack, it
automatically failed-over to the adjoining sectors. (Data sharing and
networking) It was, and still is, a damned amazing system.

Oh, and it wasn't entirely machine language.
MIT/Lincoln (Later Mitre) developed an Assembly language early on, and
there was a FORTRAN-like high level language.


--
Pete Stickney
Java Man knew nothing about coffee.