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Hedy Lamarr collides with Innovation
A MYSTERIOUS PANEL of "movers and shakers" in the throbbing heart of London’s West End ruled that famous broad or as they now call it spread spectrum lass Hedy Lamarr is far less important than a woman who popularised a very nasty programming language called COBOL.
A fly on the wall noticed an event going on at a place called 1 Aldwych which was attempting to select the 69 – yeah really - most important technology people in the industry.
Hedy was not in the list and even though noble souls attempted to displace Rear Admiral Grace Hopper and replace her with Lamarr, those wise counsels were dissed by a university boffin and his apparatchicks.
Hopper, as far as we know, never appeared nude in her role as a rear admiral and when she was pushing the extremely horrid COBOL and its infamous "four divisions" didn't even smile.
Worse than that, the mole showed us a document created by a full set of PR spinners which defines [shorely murders? Ed.] the dreaded word “innovation”.
Innovation, as the world+dog knows, means “something new”. According to the spinners this is not true. They define innovation as “the successful exploitation of new ideas relevant to the market.”
A definition too far. Bring back Hedy "The Most Beautiful Woman in films" Lamarr. May COBOL perish! May we have more spread spectra! µ
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Software weenies may think only of the first compiled language, but the comparison between Lamarr and Hopper has naught to do with COBOL, this is a *hardware* issue!

Ms. Hopper is rightly glorified not merely for debugging an early computer, but documenting it, by extracting the offending moth from the jaws of the failed relay and taping it into the machine's log book. This is real hands-on, down-in-the-trenches stuff. Lamarr's ...spread... may be a powerful ...tool... but she never implemented it.

Harrumph.
I was always rather impressed by COBOL - did what it said on the box/can.

Although a sort of RISC language, insofar as it had a very limited instruction set, you could do some neat stuff re data handling using redefines in the data division, iirc. Lots of ways to structure stuff too - I liked it:)
God bless Ol' Ironsides is what I say.

Without Our Lady of the Compiler, we'd still be reading tabloids instead of monitors. And we all know that reading is fundamental.

"That's HEDLEY!"