Quick Information
Name: Grace Murray Hooper
Born: December 9, 1906
Died: January 1, 1992
Where: New York, U.S.A.
Who: Computer Scientists
Summary: she was a pioneer of computer programming who invented one of the first linkers
Main achievements:
Presidential Medal of Freedom, National Medal of Technology and Innovation, IEEE Emanuel R. Piore Award.
Education: Yale University
Curiosity: Once the computer had stopped working because a moth was trapped inside.
She taped the moth into the logbook. It was added "First actual case of bug being found". Ever since then, computer glitches have been called BUGS.
Webography:
Wikipedia
yale.edu
M. C. - Z. G.
Early Life and Education
The daughter of Walter Fletcher Murray and Mary Campbell Van Horne,
Grace Brewster Murray was born in 1906 in New York City. In 1928, she graduated Phi Beta Kappa from Vassar College with degrees in
mathematics and physics. After receiving her master’s degree in mathematics from Yale, Hopper began teaching mathematics at
Vassar while pursuing her doctorate.
Service in the navy
After the bombing of Pearl Harbor and the United States’ entry
into World War II, Hopper decided to join the war effort. She was initially rejected because of her age and diminutive size, but she
persisted and eventually received a waiver to join the U.S. Naval Reserve. After the war ended, Hopper turned down a full professorship at
Vassar to continue her work with computers. In 1946, she left active service when the Navy declined her request for a regular commission due
to her age, but she remained a naval reservist.
Programming Pioneer
In 1949, Hopper joined the Eckert-Mauchly
Computer Corporation in Philadelphia as a senior mathematician. In the early 1950s Eckert-Mauchly was developing the Universal Automatic Computer
(UNIVAC I), the first commercial electronic computer. In 1952 she developed the first compiler called A-0,
which translated mathematical code into machine-readable code.
Throughout her career in the computer industry,
Hopper remained a Navy reservist. In 1966, age restrictions forced her to retire from the Navy as a commander. She later called it
“the saddest day of my life.”
Post-retirement
Following her retirement from the Navy, she was hired as a senior consultant to Digital Equipment Corporation (DEC). On New Year's Day 1992, Hopper died in her sleep of natural causes at her home in Arlington County, Virginia;
she was 85 years of age. She was interred with full military honors in Arlington National Cemetery.
While working on the UNIVAC I and II, Hopper pioneered the idea of automatic programming and explored new ways to use the computer to code.
Hopper proposed the idea of writing programs in words, rather than symbols, but she was told her idea would not work.
Nevertheless, she continued working on an English-language compiler, and in 1956 her team was running FLOW-MATIC, the first programming language
to use word commands. This allowed computers to be more accessible to people without an engineering or math background. That defined the new
language COBOL (an acronym for COmmon Business-Oriented Language).
In a 1980 interview Hopper explained, “translated mathematical
notation into machine code. Manipulating symbols was fine for mathematicians but it was no good for data processors who were not symbol manipulators.
Very few people are really symbol manipulators. If they are, they become professional mathematicians, not data processors. It's much easier for most
people to write an English statement than it is to use symbols. So I decided data processors ought to be able to write their programs in English,
and the computers would translate them into machine code.”
In 2016, Hopper posthumously received the Presidential Medal of Freedom,
he nation’s highest civilian honor, in recognition of her “lifelong leadership role in the field of computer science.”
She was rewarded with the National Medal of Technology and Innovation for her pioneering accomplishments in the development of
computer programming languages that simplified computer technology and opened the door to a significantly larger universe of users.