Howard Bromberg

RCA representative on the committee that created Cobol; purchaser and deliverer of the Cobol tombstone to Charles Phillips. [See Ann. Hist. Comp. Vol. 7, Num. 4, 1985, p. 309.]

Professional Experience: US Department of Commerce, 1954-1955; Univac Division, Automatic Programming Department, Sperry-Rand Corp., 1956-1958; administrator, advanced programming languages, Radio Corporation of America, 1958-1963; senior staff consultant, C-E-1-R, Inc., 1963-1966; president, Information Management, Inc., 1966-1973; founder and president, International Technology Corp., 1973-1981; independent computer consultant, 1982-present.

Honors and Awards: fellow, British Computer Society.

Bromberg has been in the forefront of the development of software utilities, languages, and applications. In addition to leading the development of the world's first Cobol compiler, he worked on the earliest English language compilers, B-0 and FLOWMATIC, with Grace Murray Hopper, developed assemblers and interpreters for minicomputers and mainframes, and created a set of Cobol preprocessors to increase programmer productivity. He served as the chairman of the ANSI Cobol Standards subcommittee for the first 10 years, and established the concept of compatible standards. He also served as the first chairman of the ISO committee on Programming Languages Standardization.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Biographical

Phillips, Charles A., "CODASYL: Reminiscences (Plus a Few Facts)," Ann. Hist. Comp., Vol. 7, No. 4, 1985, pp. 304-316.

Significant Publications

Bromberg, Howard, "Cobol Makes its Debut," J of Machine Accounting, Dec. 1960.

Bromberg, Howard, "Compilers-Where They are Today," Business Automation, Dec. 1962.

Bromberg, Howard, "The Real Effects of Standardization," Datamation, Nov. 1967.

Bromberg, Howard, "In Search of Productivity," Datamation, August 15, 1984.