Mary K. Hawes was a computer scientist who identified the need for a common business language in accounting, which led to the development of COBOL. COBOL is short for Common Business Oriented Language. It was written to resemble ordinary English. For this new language, they wish it can be run on different brands of computers and perform some advanced accounting calculation such as payroll calculation. She proposed this new language in March 1959, when she was working as a senior product planning analyst for the Electro Data Division of

Burroughs Corporation The Burroughs Corporation was a major American manufacturer of business equipment. The company was founded in 1886 as the American Arithmometer Company. In 1986, it merged with Sperry UNIVAC to form Unisys. The company's history paralleled many ...

. She approached

Grace Hopper Grace Brewster Hopper (; December 9, 1906 – January 1, 1992) was an American computer scientist, mathematician, and United States Navy rear admiral. One of the first programmers of the Harvard Mark I computer, she was a pioneer of compu ...

with the proposal, who suggested that they ask the

U.S. Department of Defense The United States Department of Defense (DoD, USDOD or DOD) is an executive branch department of the federal government charged with coordinating and supervising all agencies and functions of the government directly related to national secur ...

(DOD) for funding. Charles Philips, an employee at the DOD, agreed and in May 1959 approximately 40 representatives of computer users and computer manufacturers met and formed the Short Range Committee of the Conference on Data Systems Languages (

CODASYL CODASYL, the Conference/Committee on Data Systems Languages, was a consortium formed in 1959 to guide the development of a standard programming language that could be used on many computers. This effort led to the development of the programming l ...

). Hawes chaired the data descriptions subcommittee in the Short-Range Committee, the team that was initially tasked with identifying problems with the current business compilers. Hawes co-authored the books ''Optimized code generation from extended-entry decision tables'' published in September 1971, ''Feature analysis of generalized database management systems: CODASYL Systems Committee'' published in May 1971, and ''A survey of generalized database management systems'' published in May 1969.

References

Year of birth missing Possibly living people American women computer scientists American computer scientists COBOL {{compu-scientist-stub