The Bureau — COBOL

Specified in 1959 by the CODASYL Short Range Committee — steered intellectually by then-Captain Grace Hopper, whose earlier FLOW-MATIC compiler supplied COBOL's English-prose syntax — the language was elevated to industry default by a single act of procurement: in 1960 the U.S. Department of Defense announced it would no longer buy or lease computers that did not run COBOL. Hopper, promoted to Commodore in 1983 and Rear Admiral in 1985, retired in 1986 at age seventy-nine. More than sixty years later, roughly 70–80% of the world's business transactions still pass through COBOL code each day.

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