Grace Hopper

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Grace Hopper (January 1984)

Rear Admiral Grace Murray Hopper (December 9, 1906 – January 1, 1992) was an early computer pioneer. She was the first programmer for the Mark I Calculator and the developer of the first compiler for a computer programming language.

Hopper was born Grace Brewster Murray. She graduated Phi Beta Kappa from Vassar College with a bachelor's degree in mathematics and physics in 1928 and pursued her graduate education at Yale University, where she received an MA degree in the same two subjects in 1930 and in 1934 became the first woman to receive a Ph.D. in mathematics. Her dissertation was on New Types of Irreducibility Criteria. Hopper began teaching mathematics at Vassar in 1931; by 1941 she was an associate professor.

In 1943 she joined the U.S. Naval Reserve and was assigned to work with Howard Aiken on the Mark I Calculator. She was the first person to write a program for it. At the end of the war she was discharged from the Navy, but she continued to work on the development of the Mark II and the Mark III Calculators. It was while she was working on Mark 2 that she discovered a moth in a relay — a bug in the computer. Hopper noted it in a log book (now in the Smithsonian) as the first actual case of a bug being found. Erroneously, some have cited this incident as the genesis of the term bug, but the term was already in wide use.

In 1949, Hopper became an employee of the Eckert-Mauchly Computer Corporation and joined the team developing the UNIVAC I. In the early 1950s the company was taken over by the Remington Rand corporation and it was while she was working for them that her original compiler work was done. The compiler was known as the A compiler and its first version was A-0. Later versions were released commercially as the ARITH-MATIC, MATH-MATIC and FLOW-MATIC compilers.

She later returned to the Navy where she worked on validation software for the programming language COBOL and its compiler. COBOL was defined by the CODASYL committee which extended her FLOW-MATIC language with some ideas from the IBM equivalent, the COMTRAN. However, it was her idea that programs could be written in a language that was close to English rather than in machine code or in languages close to machine code, such as the assemblers of the time. It is fair to say that COBOL was based very much on her philosophy.

Grace Hopper

Hopper retired from the Naval Reserve with the rank of Commander at the end of 1966. She was recalled to active duty in August of 1967 for a six-month period that turned into an indefinite assignment. She was promoted to Captain in 1973 by Admiral Elmo R. Zumwalt, Jr..

In the 1970s, she pioneered the implementation of standards testing of computers, most significantly for programming languages, particularly for COBOL and Fortran. The Navy Tests for conformance to these language standards led to significant convergence among the programming language dialects of the major computer vendors. These tests, and their official administration, were taken over in the 1980s by the National Bureau of Standards, now NIST.

After Rep. Philip Crane saw her on a March 1983 segment of 60 Minutes, he championed a joint resolution in the House of Representatives which led to her promotion to Commodore by special Presidential appointment. By 1985 she became a rear admiral. She retired (involuntarily) from the Navy in 1986.

She was then hired as a senior consultant to Digital Equipment Corporation, a position she retained until her death in 1992. Her primary activity in this capacity was as a goodwill ambassador, lecturing widely on the early days of computers, her career, and on efforts that computer vendors could take to make life easier for their users. She visited a large fraction of Digital engineering facilities where she generally received a standing ovation at the conclusion of her remarks. She always wore her Navy full dress uniform to these lectures.

Her military awards and decorations include the Defense Distinguished Service Medal, the Legion of Merit, the Meritorious Service Medal, the American Campaign Medal, the World War II Victory Medal, the National Defense Service Medal, the Armed Forces Reserve Medal with two Hourglass Devices, and the Naval Reserve Medal.

She was laid to rest with full military honors in Arlington National Cemetery.

Grace Murray Hopper Park, located on South Joyce Street in Arlington, Virginia, is a small memorial park in front of her former residence and is now owned by Arlington County, Virginia.

Women at the world's largest software company, Microsoft Corporation, formed an employee group called "Hoppers" and established a scholarship in her honor. Hoppers has over 3000 members worldwide.

1 Honors
2 Anecdotes
3 See also
4 External links

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Honors

1969 – She won the first "man of the year" award from the Data Processing Management Association.
1971 – The annual "Grace Murray Hopper Award for Outstanding Young Computer Professionals" was established in 1971 by the Association for Computing Machinery.
1973 – She became the first person from the United States and the first woman of any nationality to be made a Distinguished Fellow of the British Computer Society.
1986 – Upon her retirement she received the Defense Distinguished Service Medal.
1987 – She became a Computer History Museum Fellow Award Recipient.
1991 – She received the National Medal of Technology.
1996 – USS Hopper, named in her honor, was launched. Hopper is one of few U.S. Navy ships to be named after a woman.

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Anecdotes

Photo of first computer bug.

Throughout much of her later career, Grace Hopper was much in demand as a speaker at various computer-related events. She was well-known for her lively and irreverent speaking style, as well as a rich treasury of early "war stories".

While she was working on a Mark II computer at Harvard University, her associates discovered a moth stuck in a relay and thereby impeding operation, whereupon she remarked that they were "debugging" the system. Though the term computer bug cannot be definitively attributed to Admiral Hopper, she did bring the term into popularity. The remains of the moth can be found in the group's log book at the Smithsonian Institution's National Museum of American History in Washington, D.C..

Grace Hopper is famous for her nanoseconds visual aid. People (such as generals and admirals) used to ask her why satellite communication took so long. She started handing out pieces of wire which were under one foot long, which is the distance that light travels in one nanosecond. Later she used the same pieces of wire to illustrate why computers had to be small to be fast. At many of her talks, she handed out nanoseconds to everyone in the audience, contrasting them with a coil of wire nearly a thousand feet long, representing a microsecond.