Grace Hopper (1906-1992)
In an era where women did not pursue careers to realize their potential, Grace Brewster Murray was the First Lady of the Software World.
The Great Depression began in 1928, and by 1931 over 8 million Americans were unemployed – the unemployment rate was 16 percent.
Grace Hopper was a mathematics assistant at Vassar College during this time.
Passionate about mathematics, Hopper submitted a thesis entitled The Irreducibility of Algebraic Equations to Yale and at the age of 27, got her Ph.D. in 1934.
America goes to war!
After achieved the highest training rank in the Naval Reserve during the WWII – battalion commander and graduating first in her class, Lieutenant Grace Hopper was assigned to Commander Howard Aiken’s Computation Laboratory at Harvard University, in Cambridge, Massachusetts, beginning July 2, 1944. She won the respect of Aiken and the other members of his team, who were working on the Harvard Mark I computer. The 51 feet (15.5 meters) long computer was Aiken’s brainchild and had been built by IBM.
It was electromechanical, meaning it was powered by electricity and performed calculations using punch card instructions and moving mechanical parts. It utilized computing principles first worked out by Charles Babbage and Ada Lovelace in the 1800s.
Debugged
The Mark I could perform in a day calculations that had previously taken a month. It ran 24/7. Its operators, including Hopper, often slept beside the machine, repairing it when things went wrong.
Hopper’s first major project was calculating gunnery tables needed by the Navy to aim their new guns accurately, taking account of conditions such as wind speed, weight of shell, and air density. Assembling gunnery tables involved a huge number of calculations – an ideal job for a computer.
Hopper learned a lot at Harvard, developing her computer expertize to a level matched by few other people.
In September 1947, a moth landed in one of the Mark II computer’s mechanical relays, causing the relay to fail. Someone removed the moth, so the computer was ‘debugged.’ The word already existed in computing, but Hopper and her colleagues thought it was hilarious that they were the first people to literally debug a computer.
When the war ended, Vassar College tried to tempt Hopper back, offering her a full professorship. She chose to stay at Harvard with the Naval Reserve, working in the new, intellectually stimulating, rapidly developing field of computing.
World’s first A-0 System
In 1949, Hopper left the Navy to become Senior Mathematician at an exciting new company in Philadelphia. The company was the brainchild of J. Presper Eckert and John Mauchly who were wartime computer scientists who had built ENIAC, one of the world’s first electronic general-purpose computers.
Hopper envisioned of a computer that could program itself. A computer which could take instructions written in a human-friendly language and translate them into machine code. In computing science, such a translator is called a compiler. In 1952, Hopper and her team invented the world’s first compiler, the A-0 system.
In April 1959, computer scientists from government and industry got together and defined the needs of a new computing language to be known as COBOL (Common Business- Oriented Language). Grace Hopper was the committee’s technical consultant. In the year 2000 about 240 billion of the 300 billion lines of computer code ever written had been written in COBOL.
Awards
Hopper won a very large number of awards – too many to list here!
A must mention being, The Legion of Merit in 1973.
One award raises a smile: in 1969, the Data Processing Management Association instituted a new award, the Computer Science Man- ofthe-Year award; its first winner was Grace Hopper.
In 1991, she received America’s highest technology award, The National Medal of Technology, from President George Bush.
In the end
Grace Hopper died in her sleep, age 85, of natural causes, on January 1, 1992 in Berkeley, California.
In 1997, the Navy named a new guided-missile destroyer in her honor: USS Hopper.