Grace hopper

“Amazing�

Grace Hopper

Professor David Meyers 5403 Media History and Theory Essay 01

Chantal Livesay July 21st, 2016 MA Interactive Design

GRACE HOPPER She was considered a mathematical genius at a time in history when women weren’t expected to go to college. Not only was she utterly dedicated to the service of her country, serving a total of forty-three years in the U.S. Navy, she was an important instrument in the development of many vital procedures that have made modern computers possible.

She was know by many nicknames. “Grand Old Lady of Software,” “First Lady” of data processing, the “Mother of Modern Naval Computing”, the “Grandma COBOL” and “Amazing Grace.”

Rear Admiral Grace Hopper was truly an important figure the modernization of computers.

GRACE HOPPER December 9th, 1906-January 1st, 1992

Early Life Grace Hopper was born Grace Brewster Murray on December 9th, 1906 in New York City to Mary Campbell Van Horne Murray and Walter Fletcher Murray.

When Hopper was born there were no mass-produced cars and Orville Wright had made the first test flight of an airplane three years prior. There were no refrigerators or frozen foods, no television and the only movies were silent. There were no world wars and no computers.

When Hopper was just seven years old she took apart an alarm clock to see how it worked but then couldn’t figure out how to put it back together. She took apart six more clocks before her mother caught her.

Grace Hopper at Vassar

Hopper’s mother Mary had a deep love of mathematics, that was clearly passed along to her first daughter. When Hopper entered high school her father had to have both of his legs amputated due to hardening of the arteries, but in spite of this, he lived to be 75. His courage to keep going no matter what stood in his way was passed on to his childWWren.

Hopper went to the private school Schoonmakers in New York City. When she was sixteen years old she applied to Vassar College in Poughkeepsie, New York. She would have been admitted then except she flunked a Latin exam. Vassar made Hopper wait a year before allowing her to join as a student. While she was waiting to start Vassar Hopper stayed at the Hartridge School in Plainfield, New Jersey where she would graduate from in 1924.

At Vassar, Hopper not only took her registered courses but added courses in all of the sciences. This included botany, geology, and physiology, as well as economics and business.

Hopper also pursued studies in mathematics and physics.

In 1928 she graduated from Vassar College with her bachelor of arts in mathematics and physics. After Vassar Hopper went on to Yale University where she would receive her master’s in mathematics and physics in 1930.

In June of 1930, she married Vincent Hopper. They settled in Poughkeepsie. Hopper continued to study for her Ph.D. at Yale while teaching at Vassar. In 1943 Hopper left Vassar. In 1934 she completed her doctorate work at Yale in mathematics.

The U.S. Navy December 7th, 1941 Japan attacked Pearl Harbor, Hawaii. This event would change Hopper’s life.

Hopper decided to join her family in service of her country. She tried to join the navy but hit many obstacles. She was too old at 34. She didn’t meet the physical requirements at 5’6” and weighing 105 pounds. They even said that her occupation as a mathematics professor was too important to the country and the civilian sector.

But Hopper wasn’t about to let any of that stop her from following in her family’s footsteps. She now had a challenge to overcome, getting into the Navy.

Pearl Habor attack 1941

“There was a war on! It was the only thing to do,” She said.

Hopper was so determined to get into the Navy that she forced Vassar to give her a leave of absence from teaching by threating to quit altogether. She was able to get the age, height and weight requirements waivered.

In 1943 Hopper Hopper joined the U.S. Naval Reserve Branch known as WAVES (Women Accepted For Volunteer Emergency Service.)

Liuetenant Grace Hopper

After being accepted Hopper attended the Naval Reserve Midshipman’s School for Women in Northampton, Massachusetts, where she had to pass midshipman’s school or be kicked out of the Navy. With a lot of hard work and dedication, Hopper graduated first in her class. She went from being Dr. Hopper to Lieutenant (junior grade) Hopper in 1944.

(Marx, 2004)

The Mark I

The Mark I

“There was this large mass of machiner out there making a lot of racket,” she said. “It was all bare. all open and very noisy.”

“I learned languages of oceanography, of this whole business of minesweeping, of detonators, of proximity fuses, of biomedical stuff,” she said. “We had to learn their vocabularies in order to be able to run their problems. I could switch my vocabulary and speak highly technical for the programmers, and then tell the same things to the managers a few hours later but with totally different vocabulary.”

Grace Hopper working

After graduation, she thought she’d be assigned to a cryptography and code group. But instead, she was assigned to work under Commander Howard Aiken at Harvard University. She was assigned the task of reprogramming the behemoth computer called the Mark I. The Mark I was a room-sized, relay-based calculator.

When Hopper reported for duty in July 1944 to Aiken. He gave her a copy of Charles Babbage’s memories and showed her the Mark I. Hopper was speechless.

She realized that in order to run this machine, she would need to understand it. She would spend nights analyzing the computers blueprints. Another thing that helped her understand the machine was her ability to translate real-world problems in mathematical equations, then commute those into commands that the machine could understand.

The Mark I Because of her ability to communicate Aiken soon assigned her the task to write, what would become the world’s first computer programming manual.

What Hopper produced was a 500-page book that had both the history of the Mark I as well as a guide to programming it.

Like Ada Lovelace and Charles Babbage, Hopper and Aiken developed a strong partnership. He would have her read what she had written every day. Hopper’s book focused on personalities and individuals while IBM’s book about the Mark I, completed shortly after Hopper’s, primarily gave credit to the IBM teams in Endicott, NY, who had constructed but not programmed the machines.

Ada Lovelace

“I can’t write a book, I’ve never written one,” she said.

“By the time anybody knew anything bout her, she was a dead duck, and everybody was going electric,,” she said.

One of the first chapters in Hopper's book described earlier calculating machines. Just like Lovelace had understood that Babbage’s Analytical Engine had a special quality, she and Aiken believed that the Mark I had a special quality that would distinguish it from other computers of the time. The Mark I received its orders via punch tape and could be reprogrammed with new instructions.

By 1945 the Harvard Mark I was the world’s easiest programmable big computer, this was largely in thanks to Hopper. It was able to switch tasks by simply getting new instructions via punched paper tape rather than requiring a reconfiguration of its cables or hardware. However, this was largely unnoticed. While the Mark I was simpler to reprogram it still used slow and clackey electromechanical relays rather than electronic components like vacuum tubes. (Isaacson, 2014) Not only did Hopper program the Mark I but she also had a hand in programming its predecessors the Mark II and III. Grace Hopper

Debugging the System Hopper and her team also popularized the terms “bug” and “debugging” after one night when working on the Mark II the machine suddenly stopped. The crew began looking for the problem only to discover a moth.

The moth had wingspan of four inches and had somehow gotten smashed in one of the electrical relays. After it was retrieved, it was added to the log book with tape. After this they started referring to ferreting out glitches as “debugging the machine.”

Moth found in the Mark II

After the Mark I In 1946 Hopper resigned her leave of absence from Vassar.

She went on to become a research fellow in engineering and applied physics at Harvard’s Computation Laboratory.

In1949 she joined the Eckert-Mauchly Computer Corporation as a Senior Mathematician. By then the computer programs contained mnemonics that were transferred into binary code instructions that were executable by the computer. With her team, Hopper extended this improvement on binary code with the development of her first compiler, the A-O. The A-O was a series of compilers translated symbolic mathematical code into machine code. This allowed a specification of call numbers that were assigned to the collected programming routines that were stored on magnetic tape.

The UNIVAC System

UNIVAC I AND II Computer programs contained mnemonics that were transferred into binary code instructions that were executable by the computer. With her team, Hopper extended this improvement on binary code with the development of her first compiler, the A-O. The A-O was a series of compilers translated symbolic mathematical code into machine code. This allowed a specification of call numbers that were assigned to the collected programming routines that were stored on magnetic tape.

Development for Univac of the B-O, which was later known as the FLOW-MATIC. The goal was that it could be designed to translate a language that could be used for typical business tasks, Hopper, and her team were able to make the UNIVAC I and II understand twenty English statements.

Three years her idea was finally accepted and she published her first compiler paper in 1952.

UNIVAC II

COBOL Code Hopper participated in the first meetings to formulate specifications for a common business language. This lead to the CODASYL Executive Committee, which she was one of the two technical advisers and several of her staff were members of the Short Range Committee to help define the basic COBOL language design. This design was greatly influenced by the FLOW-MATIC. The first COBOL specifications appeared in 1959.

With the help of her team, they developed COBOL manuals and tools. Hopper wanted to standardize the use of compilers. With her direction, the Navy developed a set of programs and procedure for validating COBOL compilers. The concept of validation had a widespread impact on other programming languages and organization.

This lead to national and international standards and validation facilities for most programming language. (Grace Murray Hopper)

Retirement and Death In 1966 Hopper retired from the Naval Reserve but because of her pioneering computer work, she was recalled to active duty at the of 60 in 1967. She tackled the standardization of communication between different computer languages. Hopper remained with the Navy for 19 years. She retired for the last time from the Navy at the age of 79 in 1986. She now had earned the rank of Rear Admiral and was the leader in the Naval Data Automation Command and the oldest serving officer in the service.

After retiring from the Navy, Hopper took another job that allowed her to stay in the computer industry for several more years. At the age of 85, she passed away on January 1, 1992. (Editors, n.d.)

Awards and Recognition 1969: Hopper was awarded the inaugural Data Processing Management Association Man of the Year award (now called the Distinguished Information Sciences Award).

1971: The annual Grace Murray Hopper Award for Outstanding Young Computer Professionals was established in 1971 by the Association for Computing Machinery.

1973: First American and the first woman of any nationality to be made a Distinguished Fellow of the British Computer Society.

1982: American Association of University Women Achievement Award and an Honorary Doctor of Science from Marquette University.[32] 1985: Honorary Doctor of Letters from Western New England College (now Western New England University).

1986: Upon her retirement, she received the Defense Distinguished Service Medal.

1987: The first Computer History Museum Fellow Award Recipient "for contributions to the development of programming languages, for standardization efforts, and for lifelong naval service."

1988: Golden Gavel Award at the Toastmasters International convention in Washington, DC. 1991: National Medal of Technology.

1991: Elected a Fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences.

1996: USS Hopper (DDG-70) was launched. Nicknamed Amazing Grace, it is on a very short list of U.S. military vessels named after women.

2001: Eavan Boland wrote a poem dedicated to Grace Hopper titled "Code" in her 2001 release Against Love Poetry.

2001: The Gracies, the Government Technology Leadership Award were named in her honor.

2009: The Department of Energy's National Energy Research Scientific Computing Center named its flagship system "Hopper".

2009: Office of Naval Intelligence creates the Grace Hopper Information Services Center.

2013: Google made the Google Doodle for Hopper's 107th birthday an animation of her sitting at a computer, using COBOL to print out her age. At the end of the animation, a moth flies out of the computer.

Works Cited Editors, B. (n.d.). Grace Hopper Biography. (A. T. Network, Producer) Retrieved from The Biography.com Website: www.biography.com/people/grace-hopper-21406809 Grace Hopper. (n.d.). Retrieved from Wikipedia: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ Grace_Hopper Grace Murray Hopper. (n.d.). Grace Hopper Celebration of Women in Computing.

Isaacson, W. (2014, December 3). Grace Hopper, computing poineer. Retrieved from Harvard Gazette: http://www.news.harvard.edu/gazette/story/2014/12/ grace-hopper-computing-pioneer Marx, C. (2004). Grace Hopper, The First Woman to Program the First Computer in the United States. New York City, New York: The Rosen Publishing Group