Grace Hopper
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Grace Hopper |
Rear Admiral Grace Murray Hopper (
December 9,
1906 –
January 1,
1992) was an American
computer scientist and
naval officer. A pioneer in the field, she was the first
programmer of the
Mark I Calculator and developed the first
compiler for a
computer programming language.
Hopper was born as
Grace Brewster Murray. She married Vincent Hopper in
1930 and was
divorced in
1945. 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 a
Master's degree in those subjects in
1930. In
1934 she received a
Ph.D. in mathematics. Her
dissertation was on
New Types of Irreducibility Criteria. Hopper began teaching mathematics at
Vassar in
1931, and by
1941 she was an
associate professor.
In
1943 she joined the
U.S. Naval Reserve on active duty 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 separated from active duty with the Navy, remaining in the reserves, 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 II that she discovered a
moth in a relay — a bug in the computer. Hopper noted it in a log book (now in the
Smithsonian Institution) 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.
In the 1970s, she pioneered the implementation of
standards testing of computers, most significantly for
programming languages, particularly for
COBOL and the original
FORTRAN language,
Formula
Translator/
Translation, today known as 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 the National Institute of Standards and Technology,
NIST.
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Grace Hopper (January 1984) |
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 again retired in
1971 but was asked to return to active duty again in
1972. She was promoted to
Captain in
1973 by
Admiral Elmo R. Zumwalt, Jr..
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, Lower Half. She retired (involuntarily) from the Navy on
August 14,
1986. At a celebration held in Boston on the
USS Constitution to celebrate her retirement, Hopper was awarded the
Defense Distinguished Service Medal, the highest award possible by the Department of Defense. At the moment of her retirement, she was the oldest officer in the US Navy and aboard the oldest ship in the US Navy.
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:
*
Defense Distinguished Service Medal*
Legion of Merit*
Meritorious Service Medal*
American Campaign Medal*
World War II Victory Medal*
National Defense Service Medal*
Armed Forces Reserve Medal with two
Hourglass Devices
*
Naval Reserve MedalShe was laid to rest with full military honors in
Arlington National Cemetery; Section 59, grave 973 [
1].
*
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.
*
1988 – She received the Golden Gavel Award at the
Toastmasters International convention in Washington, DC.
*
1991 – She received the
National Medal of Technology.
*
1996 –
USS Hopper (DDG-70), named in her honor, was launched.
Hopper is one of few
U.S. Navy ships to be named after a woman.
Grace Murray Hopper Park, located on South Joyce Street in
Arlington, Virginia, is a small memorial park in front of her former residence (River House Apartments) 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.
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 just under one foot long, which is the distance that light travels in one
nanosecond. She gave these pieces of wire the
metonym "nanoseconds." Later she used the same pieces of wire to illustrate why computers had to be small to be fast. At many of her talks and visits, she handed out "nanoseconds" to everyone in the audience, contrasting them with a coil of wire nearly a thousand feet long, representing a
microsecond. Later, while giving these lectures while working for DEC, she passed out packets of pepper which she called
picoseconds.
*The famous quotation
"It's easier to ask forgiveness than it is to get permission." is often attributed to Grace Hopper.[
2]
Obituary notices by
* Betts, Mitch (
Computerworld 26: 14, 1992)
* Bromberg, Howard (
IEEE Software 9: 103–104, 1992)
* Danca, Richard A. (
Federal Computing Week 6: 26–27, 1992)
* Hancock, Bill (
Digital Review 9: 40, 1992)
* Power, Kevin (
Government Computer News 11: 70, 1992)
*
Sammet, J.E. (
Communications of the ACM 35: 128–132, 1992)
* Weiss, Eric A. (
IEEE Annals of the History of Computing 14: 56–58, 1992)
*
Women in computing*
Systems engineering*
Futures techniques*
Biography and
Images from the
U.S. Navy Naval Historical Center*
Grace Hopper links from
Chips, the U.S. Navy
information technology magazine
*
A shorter Hopper biography*
Biography and
Wit and Wisdom from a Yale website
*
www.hopper.navy.mil Official U.S. Navy website for the
USS Hopper (DDG-70), which includes a
biography of Hopper *
Rear Admiral Grace Hopper with pages about the lady and the ship named after her
*
Grace Murray Hopper Award*
The Government Technology Leadership Awards: The Gracies*
Biography from the San Diego Supercomputer Center*
Page from log book with moth/bug at the National Museum of American History*
More details and photos from the moth/bug in the Mark II
