New-Tech Europe Magazine | November 2018

to convince John von Neumann to give the machine a much-needed stop instruction. Hopper, through experience, was keenly aware of the problems that faced those writing software and saw the need to make programs easier to write and debug. But it took three years to convince the management of the Eckert-Mauchly Computer Corporation, where she worked in the early 1950s, of the importance of creating a high-level language that used English words rather than obscure alphanumeric instruction codes. Eventually, she gained the opportunity to put the idea into practice but even then management thought compilers could only cope with simple arithmetic and not more complex concepts. She persevered and ultimately was able to pull together the team that would create Cobol, the first widely accepted high-level language. By the time Hopper became director of the US Navy’s Programming Languages Group in the late 1960s, software engineering had become the driving force of computing. And mainframes running programs written for another language, Fortran, were on the way to putting men on the Moon. Poised as we are at the beginning of the fourth industrial revolution, the role of the outsider in influencing the direction of the future of engineering is as important as it was when John Harrison was working before the start of the first industrial revolution, or when people such as Lamarr and Hopper worked on the concepts that ultimately drove the IT-powered third revolution. Inventors and makers provide vital input to the way technology is moving and that is one of the reasons why RS has put together History Makers – a series of light- hearted podcasts that bring the inventors of yesterday face to face with technology of today, from WiFi to 3D printing in a blast of jokes, facts, sketches and songs and which highlight how engineering has changed our lives. The History Makers podcasts are available to download from www.designspark.com, www.designspark.podbean.com and the iOS Podcast app by searching for DesignSpark.

Leonie Clayson, DesignSpark Community Manager

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