Grace Hopper

Lore & Background

Grace Hopper earned a Ph.D. in mathematics from Yale University in 1934 and was a professor of mathematics at Vassar College. During World War II, she left Vassar to join the United States Navy Reserve, serving on the Harvard Mark I computer programming staff under Howard H. Aiken. In 1949, she joined the Eckert–Mauchly Computer Corporation, where she worked on the UNIVAC I and managed development of one of the first COBOL compilers. By 1952, she had finished a program linker (originally called a compiler) for the A-0 System. In 1954, she led the department for automatic programming at Eckert–Mauchly, releasing early compiled languages like FLOW-MATIC. In 1959, she participated in the CODASYL consortium, helping create COBOL, a machine-independent language based on English words.

Reader's Guide

Grace Hopper's significance lies in her foundational contributions to computer programming. She was the first to devise the theory of machine-independent programming languages, which led to the creation of FLOW-MATIC and COBOL, an early high-level language still in use. Her work on the first compiler (a linker/loader) for the A-0 System demonstrated that computers could translate English terms into machine code, simplifying programming for data processors. Hopper's legacy includes the USS Hopper destroyer, the Cray XE6 'Hopper' supercomputer, and the Nvidia GPU architecture 'Hopper'. She received 40 honorary degrees, the National Medal of Technology in 1991, and the Presidential Medal of Freedom posthumously in 2016. In 2024, the IEEE dedicated a plaque at the University of Pennsylvania honoring her invention of the A-0 compiler.

Did You Know?

• Hopper was one of the first programmers on the Harvard Mark I computer.
• She wrote the first computer manual, 'A Manual of Operation for the Automatic Sequence Controlled Calculator.'
• She kept a clock that ran backward to challenge the idea that 'We've always done it this way.'
• Hopper was posthumously awarded the Presidential Medal of Freedom in 2016.

Notable Quotes (Wikiquote)

"From then on, when anything went wrong with a computer, we said it had bugs in it." — Grace Hopper "I handed my passport to the immigration officer, and he looked at it and looked at me and said, "What are you?" — Grace Hopper "In total desperation, I called over to the engineering building, and I said, "Please cut off a nanosecond and send it over to me." — Grace Hopper "At the end of about a week, I called back and said, "I need something to compare this to. Could I please have a microsecond?" — Grace Hopper