Biography

Grace Hopper

     Grace Brewster Murray was born in 1906 to a prosperous family on the Upper West side of Manhattan. Grace’s father was an insurance executive and her mother was a mathematician. Her mother had always been interested in math, but, as it was not considered proper for a lady at the time, she wasn’t able to study anything beyond geometry. Both of her parents encouraged her curiosity and her father made sure she received the same education and opportunities as her brothers. She graduated from Vassar with a degree in math and physics, continuing on to study and earn a Ph.D at Yale where she graduated in 1934. 

    Grace married a comparative literature professor named Vincent Hopper, and joined the faculty of her previous school, Vassar. A few years later, she was bored, so after taking partial leave from Vassar she went off to study with Richard Courant, a well known mathematician at New York University. 

When World War Two begun and Pearl Harbor was attacked in 1941, Grace Hopper divorced her husband, quit her job teaching math and joined the U.S. Navy. After graduating first in her class from the Naval Reserve Midshipmen’s school at Smith college as Lieutenant Grace Hopper, she was sent to Harvard University to work on the Mark I. 

The Mark I, a five-ton computer used for gunnery and ballistic

 calculations.The computer, controlled by pre-punched 

paper tape, could carry out addition, subtraction, 

multiplication, division and reference to previous results.

    The Mark I was a five ton digital computer used for gunnery and ballistic calculations that had been conceived in 1937 by Howard Aiken. In 1944 Hopper reported for duty at Harvard, where Howard Aiken brought her to see the Mark I. After carefully analyzing the blueprints of the machine until she had figured out how it worked, Aiken assigned her the project of writing the worlds first computer programing manual. 

Since Hopper had never written a book before, she and Aiken would meet every evening to edit the pages she’d written that day. The finished product was a five hundred paged guide to programing the Mark I, as well as the history of the giant computer. 

Richard Bloch began working with the Mark I three months before Hopper had, and when she arrived he was the one who helped her figure out exactly how to operate the computer. While working on the Mark I, Hopper developed the idea of a compiler, which is a computer program used to transform a source code into another computer language. she also is known for popularizing the terms bug and debugging. The Mark II was kept in a building without screens on the windows, where insects could easily find their way in. One night, the machine broke and the team found a moth that had been crushed by the electromechanical relays, which was recorded as the first actual case of a bug being found.

In 1949, she put her career on the line to join the Eckert-Mauchly Computer Corporation, to provide businesses with computers. She believed that a wider audience would use computers if there where tools that were both programmer friendly and application friendly. A true visionary, Lieutenant Hopper wanted to develop a computer language entirely in English, so it could be applied to typical business tasks such as automatic billing and payroll calculations. Pursuing this belief, she pushed forward FLOW-MATIC, but was told that she couldn't do it because computers weren't able to understand English. It was three years before the idea was finally accepted. In 1952 she published her first paper on compilers, and spent large amounts of time trying to  convince business managers that english language compilers like COBOL and FLOW-MATIC where in fact possible. During a brief retirement, Hopper led the effort to convince the entire Navy to use COBOL as the standard computer language.

Naval Ordnance Development Award

Hopper was awarded the Naval Ordnance Development Award for her pioneering applications programming success on the Mark I, Mark II, and Mark III computers.

Unfortunately, by the time anyone knew about the worlds most easily programmable computer, everyone was going electronic and the clunky electromechanical relays of the Mark I and II just wouldn't do anymore.

When Hopper visited the ENIAC in 1945, she believed that the Mark I was still superior, on account of it being easily programmable. Eventually Hopper changed her outlook on the ENIAC, as changes where still being made to improve its programing time. To Hopper's delight, the people at the forefront of the computer programming revolution, were women.

Rear Admiral Grace Hopper died in her sleep of natural causes on January 1st 1992.