Jean Sammet

Developer of FORMAC

• Born: March 23, 1928
• Birthplace: New York, New York
• Died: May 20, 2017
• Place of death: Maryland

Primary Company/Organization: IBM

Introduction

Jean Sammet was an influential programmer who assisted in the creation of COBOL, developed FORMAC, oversaw the development of Ada, and wrote a 1969 book on the history and fundamentals of programming that is considered a classic. She was active in the computer industry in the 1960s and 1970s, holding a number of key positions in industry groups and organizing the first conference on the history of programming languages of the Association for Computing Machinery (ACM) and its Special Interest Group on Symbolic and Algebraic Manipulation. She was also the ACM's first woman president.

Early Life

Jean E. Sammet was born on March 23, 1928, in New York City to lawyers Harry and Ruth Sammet. Her father's practice focused on wills and estates; her mother stopped practicing law when she married. Both Jean and her younger sister, Helen, attended local public schools. Although she had displayed an aptitude for mathematics at an early age, Sammet could not attend the all-boys Bronx High School of Science. Instead, she attended the all-girls Julia Richman High School and enrolled in every mathematics course it offered. After high school, she attended Mount Holyoke College in South Hadley, Massachusetts. She had looked through the course catalogs from several women's colleges before choosing Mount Holyoke because of the strength of its math program. In 1948, she received a bachelor's degree in mathematics (minoring in political science and taking enough education courses to be certified for teaching). Sammet continued her studies at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, earning her master's degree in mathematics in 1949. She began work on her PhD in mathematics 1948 while working as a teaching assistant in the mathematics department. Although she did not complete the degree, Mount Holyoke conferred an honorary doctorate of science on Sammet in 1978.

In 1951, Sammet tried to find a position teaching mathematics in New York City, but the city was not hiring new teachers at the high school level. She tried New Jersey, but it would not hire her because she had not taken two prerequisite courses for teachers: a course on the history of New Jersey and an education course. Sammet argued that the courses were irrelevant to the teaching of mathematics, but she lost that argument. She wound up working for the Metropolitan Life Insurance Company and became part of an in-house training program in punch-card accounting machines. She enjoyed it but was not offered a job using the machines, so she returned to school to work on her doctorate at Columbia University while teaching at Barnard College. The academic life did not interest her, however, and she sought out work with computers.

Life's Work

From 1955 to 1958, Sammet was in charge of the first scientific computer programming group; she was programming computers for use by scientists at Sperry Rand. Sperry Rand had been created that year when Sperry Gyroscope, an aviation equipment manufacturer that had expanded into electronics and computing, acquired Remington Rand, the company that built the UNIVAC I (the Universal Automatic Computer) in 1951. (Divisions of Sperry Rand would later persist as Unisys and Honeywell.)

After leaving Sperry Rand, Sammet worked for Sylvania, an electric products company that merged in 1959 with General Telephone and expanded into electronics. She was hired to develop software for MOBIDIC, a computing machine Sylvania was building for the US Army Signal Corps. She worked as a consultant in programming research for Sylvania from 1958 to 1961 as part of the original COBOL group, which developed the Common Business-Oriented Language (COBOL), a programming language for use in business and administration. COBOL was built on the FLOW-MATIC language of Grace Hopper and was developed as a joint effort by Sylvania, Sperry Rand, RCA, Honeywell, IBM, the Burroughs Corporation, and the federal government (specifically the Air Force, the National Bureau of Standards, and the David Taylor Model Basin). An initial series of meetings held at the Pentagon to set up the administrative and working bodies that would develop COBOL called for an executive committee to perform oversight and separate committees to make recommendations for a business-oriented programming language on short-range, intermediate, and long-range bases. The long-range committee was never formed, and the intermediate committee never began operations, so the whole of the project in practice fell to the short-range committee. Sammet was one of six members of the subcommittee of the short-range committee that developed the language's specifications. The other members were Vernon Reeves of Sylvania Electric Products, William Selden and Gertrude Tierney of IBM, and Howard Bromberg and Howard Discount of RCA.

At the end of 1960, COBOL compilers were successfully demonstrated, including the running of a COBOL program on computers from two different manufacturers (including UNIVAC), to demonstrate compatibility. This first version of COBOL was approved by the executive committee and defined as COBOL 60; later versions would be similarly named after their year of specification. One of the unique features of COBOL—even compared to later languages—was that it explicitly supported self-modifying code, one of the few high-level languages to do so; the “Alter X to proceed to Y” statement would modify X statements after the Alter statement to read as Y statements instead. COBOL also introduced copybooks, sections of code that can be copied from a master program and inserted into other programs in order to ensure consistency. Many of the languages that followed did likewise. Today, COBOL is still in wide use by business and government systems.

After the release of COBOL, Sammet joined IBM to manage the Boston Advanced Programming Center. At IBM, she proposed and developed FORMAC: the Formula Manipulation Compiler, an extension of Fortran that allowed for advanced mathematics beyond what Fortran could do. Fortran, the IBM Mathematical Formula Translating System, was a scientific programming language developed by IBM in the 1950s under John Backus as an alternative to assembly language. Fortran had introduced the first optimizing compiler in order to keep the execution time-efficient.

Sammet's programming work continued at IBM, and she became one of the most prominent programmers, writing a groundbreaking history and overview of programming languages in 1969. She pioneered work in natural language (language speakers have natural facility with, as opposed to the highly symbolic language of a mathematical formula) in mathematics programming, and she was made the programming technology planning manager for IBM's Federal Systems Division in 1968, serving until 1974. In 1979, IBM made her software technology manager, and she oversaw work on IBM's Ada. Ada is an object-oriented high-level computer programming language, largely extended from Pascal, named for Ada Lovelace, who assisted Charles Babbage in the nineteenth century and is considered the first computer programmer.

Sammet was a member of the Association for Computing Machinery (ACM), the largest and most prestigious computing society, which is organized into a number of special interest groups (SIGs), where most of its activity transpires. Many of the SIGs have become famous or influential in themselves, in their respective subfields. Sammet chaired SIGPLAN, the ACM Special Interest Group for Programming Languages, which today holds numerous programming conferences. She also founded SIGSAM, the Special Interest Group on Symbolic and Algebraic Manipulation. From 1974 to 1976, she was ACM's first woman president. At other times held the positions of vice president, editor in chief of ACM Computing Reviews and The ACM Guide to Computing Literature, and, in 1978, chair of the first SIGPLAN History of Programming Languages Conference.

In 1994, Sammet was made a Fellow of the ACM. She also was made a Fellow of the Computer History Museum in 2001. SIGPLAN awarded her its Distinguished Service Award in 1997. The Computer Society of the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE) bestowed the Computer Pioneer Award on her in 2009.

Personal Life

In 1956–58, at Adelphi College, Sammet taught one of the first graduate programming courses in the United States. She retired to Silver Springs, Maryland, where she died after a short illness and hospitalization on May 20, 2017. She was eighty-nine years old.

Bibliography

Ensmerger, Nathan L. The Computer Boys Take Over: Computers, Programmers, and the Politics of Technical Expertise. Cambridge: MIT, 2010. Print. A history of software development from a sociological and political context.

Lee, J. A. N. "Jean E. Sammet." Computer Pioneers, IEEE Computer Society, Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers, 2017, history.computer.org/pioneers/sammet.html. Accessed 12 July 2017.

Lohr, Steve. Go To: The Story of the Math Majors, Bridge Players, Engineers, Chess Wizards, Maverick Scientists, and Iconoclasts; The Programmers Who Created the Software Revolution. New York: Basic, 2001. Print. A behind-the-scenes history of the computer industry, focusing on advances in software and programming in Sammet's era.

Lohr, Steve. "Jean Sammett, Co-Designer of a Pioneering Computer Language, Dies at 89." The New York Times, 4 June 2017, www.nytimes.com/2017/06/04/technology/obituary-jean-sammet-software-designer-cobol.html. Accessed 12 July 2017.

Sammet, Jean. Programming Languages: History and Fundamentals. Englewood Cliffs: Prentice-Hall, 1969. Print. Sammet's nontechnical introduction to programming languages in the early days of computer programming.

Stanley, Autumn. Mothers and Daughters of Invention: Notes for a Revised History of Technology. Newark: Rutgers UP, 1995. Print. A major work on the role of women in the history of technology and the overlooked contributions of Sammet and others.