She was on the original committee that developed COBOL (Common Business Oriented Language). COBOL was a computer programming language designed and used primarily for business applications.
Despite this huge achievement, Grace maintained a modest attitude. Upon being asked how she developed COBOL she once lightheartedly stated, “It really came about because I couldn’t balance my checkbook.”
Grace spiced her talk with many amusing anecdotes. One such story regarded the increasing speed of computers, where she introduced the idea of the “nanosecond.” She showed the nanosecond to be the distance that electricity traveled over an 18 inch wire, which she willingly distributed to audience members.
She told a story about how the computer term “bug” came to be in our vocabulary. Apparently, in the early days of computing there were vacuum tubes and wire meshes. The wire meshes were the early memory devices of the computer. One day the computer she was working on ceased to function. Upon examination, someone found that a bug had found its way into the wire mesh and had fried itself in the process. By entangling itself in the wire mesh, the bug had short circuited the CPU.
Since then, whenever someone looks for the cause of a program or computer malfunction it is called “debugging” the computer.
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