Grace Hopper
PROGRAMMING PIONEER Military Leader, Mathematician, Computer Programmer
Russell Dow | 21 July 2016 Essay 01: Digital Revolution Professor David Meyers IXDS5403 Media History & Theory Master of Arts Degree in Interactive Design LC4D @ Lindsey Wilson College, Columbia, Kentucky
GRACE HOPPER Grace hopper was a Military Leader, Mathematician, Computer Programmer who inspired many generations of youths interested in math and programming and created what most of us know as programming with the development and creation off the first compiler and precursor to the widely used COBOL language. Hopper was a relentless leader and visionary who not only knew how to code but how to sell the idea.
“People have an enormous tendency to resist change. They love to say, ‘We’ve always done it this way.’ I try to fight that.” —Grace Hopper
Early Life Grace Hopper, born Grace Brewster Murray in New York City, December 9, 1906. From an earlier age Grace excelled in and was interested in mathematics. In 1928 she graduated from Vassar College with a BA in mathematics and physics. A Vassar College Fellowship allowed her to study at Yale University followed leading to her MA in mathematics from in 1930. It was in 1930 when Grace married Vincent Foster Hopper, an English teacher from New York University, Vincent died in 1945 during World War II. Hopper started teaching in 1931 at Vassar while still studying at Yale while pursuing her Ph.D. in mathematics for which she received in 1934, one of four women in a doctoral program of ten students, and her doctorate in mathematics was a rare accomplishment in its day.
Image source: http://ringzero.logbar.jp/press
image source: computer history museum
Career In December 1943 Grace joined the U.S. Naval Reserve and reached the level of lieutenant in June of 1944. During this time she was assigned to the Bureau of Ordnance Computation Project at Harvard University’s Cruft Laboratories. This is where she learned to program with Aiken’s group on the Mark I computer.
task of programming which was to: Compute the coefficients of the arctan series (Hopper, 1994)
On her arrival at Cruft Laboratory she immediately encountered the Mark I computer. For her it was an attractive gadget, similar to the alarm clocks of her youth; she could hardly wait to disassemble it and figure it out. Hopper became the third person to program the Mark I. (Hopper, 1994)
Hopper sometimes is attributed for the term debugging; It was the first time an actual “computer bug”, a moth, was found and shorted out one of the 17,000 relays in the Mark II giving way to the terms “debugging” and “computer bug”.
Immediately after her arrival Aiken gave her a first
image source: computer history museum
After the war she remained a reserve officer in the Naval Reserve and continued as a research fellow at Harvard where she continued to advance programming with the Mark II and Mark III.
In 1949, Admiral Hopper moved to private industry starting work with Eckert-Mauchly as a Senior Mathematician and there she worked with John Eckert and John Mauchly on the UNIVAC computer. Eventually the Eckert-Mauchly Computer Corporation was purchased by Remington Rand and was changed to the UNIVAC Division. In 1952, Hopper’s team created the first compiler which was termed the FLOW-MATIC, for computer languages. The FLOW-MATIC was a precursor for the Common Business Oriented Language, COBOL, which is used around the world and created during her time in the UNIVAC Division at the Remington Rand Corporation. What this did was create a common business language that eventually led to the national and international standards and validation facilities for most programming languages worldwide.
image source: U.S. Naval Historical Center
Shown Above is the first “Computer Bug”, an actual Moth found trapped between points at Relay # 70, Panel F, of the Mark II Aiken Relay Calculator while it was being tested at Harvard University, 9 September 1947. The operators affixed the moth to the computer log, with the entry: “First actual case of bug being found”. In 1988, this log, with the moth still taped by the entry, was in the Naval Surface Warfare Center Computer Museum at Dahlgren, Virginia.
LATER LIFE In 1966, Hopper returned to the Naval Reserve and at age 60 called to active duty to tackle standardizing communication between different computer languages within the military. Admiral Hopper retired in 1986 at age 76 as a Rear Admiral and the oldest serving officer in the armed service. Just 5 years later in 1991, President George Bush presented Hopper, the first female individual recipient, the National Medal of Technology. Admiral Hopper if often regarded as one of the most influential computer scientist of the 20th century and has be respected and honored by world leaders, Presidents and some of the biggest names in science and industry. It was President Obama who in his 2016 State of the Union placed Hopper with the likes of Edison the Wright Brothers and Sally Ride.
“America is Thomas Edison and the Wright Brothers and George Washington Carver. America is Grace Hopper and Katherine Johnson and Sally Ride.� - President Barack Obama Grace died on January 1st, 1992 and was buried and honored at Arlington National Cemetery.
image source: U.S. Naval Historical Center
Awards and acknowledgment 1971: The annual Grace Murray Hopper Award for Outstanding Young Computer Professionals was established in 1971 by the Association for Computing Machinery.
1991: National Medal of Technology.
1973: First American and the first woman of any nationality to be made a Distinguished Fellow of the British Computer Society.
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.
1982: American Association of University Women Achievement Award and an Honorary Doctor of Science from Marquette University.
2001: Eavan Boland wrote a poem dedicated to Grace Hopper titled “Code” in her 2001 release Against Love Poetry.
1985: Honorary Doctor of Letters from Western New England College (now Western New England University).
2001: The Gracies, the Government Technology Leadership Award were named in her honor.
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.
image source: public.navy.mil
1991: Elected a Fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences.
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.
LIFE ACCOMPLISHED Among some of the Influence Admiral Hopper left on the world was that she was proactive in educating and encourage young people to learn to code and program and to sell the idea. She also encouraged women to be a part of the world of computing throughout her life. Two notable current honors are that the Association of Computing Machinery offers a Grace Murray Hopper Award, annually and that The Grace Hopper Celebration of Women in Computing has become the world’s largest gathering of women technologists. It is produced by the Anita Borg Institute and presented in partnership with ACM.
“People are allergic to change. You have to get out and sell the idea.” —Grace Hopper
BIBLIOGRAPHY Editors, Biography.com / A&E Television Networks. (n.d.). Grace Hopper Biography. Retrieved from Biography.com: http://www.biography.com/people/grace-hopper-21406809 Hopper, G. M. (1994). The Grace Hopper Celebration of Women in Computing 1994 . The Grace Hopper Celebration of Women in Computing 1994 . Washington, DC. Isaacson, W. (2014). The Innovators; How a Group of Hackers, Geniuses, and Geeks Created the Digital Revolution. New York, NY: Simon & Schuster. listed, M. -s. (2016). Wiki Grace Hopper. Retrieved from Wikipedia : https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Grace_ Hopper Museum, C. H. (2016 ). Computer History Museum fellow awards. Retrieved from Computer History Museum: www.computerhistory.org/fellowawards/hall/bios/Grace,Hopper/ www.computerhistory.org/fellowawards/hall/bios/Grace,Hopper/. (n.d.). Retrieved from www. computerhistory.org: www.computerhistory.org/fellowawards/hall/bios/Grace,Hopper/
image source: public.navy.mil