In the beginning, computers were people. When America entered World War II in 1941, a need arose to calculate precise trajectories of ballistic weapons. At the Ballistic Research Laboratory, Aberdeen Proving Ground, Md., a hundred or so women - all college graduates - were enlisted to compute artillery firing tables using mechanical calculators. Their time spent at the task was calculated in “girl-years,” or “kilo-girl hours.” It was a cumbersome, inefficient system, but it was about to change, due in no small part to the efforts of Navy Reserve Lt. j.g. Grace Murray Hopper.

Joining the war effort

After several years teaching mathematics at Vassar College, N.Y., Hopper joined the Navy Reserve in 1943 and was assigned to the Navy's Bureau of Ships Computation Project at Harvard University, Mass. She reported to Navy Cmdr. Howard H. Aiken, an intense, no-nonsense officer who put her to work on the Mark I, America's first digital computer.

At 50 feet long, 8 feet tall, and 8 feet wide, the Mark I was an imposing sight. In contrast to other, single-function calculating machines, the Mark I was a general-purpose computer, adaptable to different tasks. Aiken had designed it to help him calculate formulas more efficiently, calling it “a lazy man's idea.” The Mark I was programmed using punched paper tape loops, the holes in the tape representing binary ones and zeros. Mechanical feelers translated the holes into directions for the machine. Hopper called the process of giving the computer instructions “coding” and was not happy when it later became known as programming.

Early on, each program was written from scratch, a constant “reinvention of the wheel” Hopper considered wasteful of time and effort. She began using notebooks to record snippets of code that could be reused when needed, though they still were entered manually for each program. Hopper called them “subroutines.” Eventually, Aiken assigned her to create a manual for the Mark I, which became the first computer manual ever written. The Mark I proved so much faster and more accurate than manual computation methods that soon its processing time was booked 24 hours a day. No longer did the Navy need to employ rows of women with calculators to compute firing tables; with Hopper's programming, the Mark I could do the job in record time.

Compilers and COBOL

Hopper could have returned to teaching after the war, but by then, she was well aware she was helping to make history, and she stayed with Aiken at Harvard, where she worked on the Mark II and III computers.

In 1949, she went to work for Eckert-Mauchly Computer Corp., helping develop the UNIVAC - Universal Automatic Computer - a fully electronic system created for the Census Bureau and the first computer capable of translating numbers into letters, which set the stage for a revolution in the nascent computer industry.

Hopper realized subroutines now could be stored and assembled by the computer itself, instead of tediously copied from a notebook. She wrote a piece of code, called a compiler, that retrieved and stacked subroutines in the computer's memory to create a program. She later created a more capable version called MATH-MATIC, but the true breakthrough came with her FLOW-MATIC compiler, which for the first time allowed coding in plain English. By 1958, all Navy shipyards were using it.

By then, however, several competing programming languages were in use. DoD realized a standard was needed and established a committee to create one, with Hopper taking a major role. What emerged in 1959 was COBOL - Common Business-Oriented Language - largely based on Hopper's FLOW-MATIC compiler. Like its predecessor, COBOL was a plain-English computer language that made programming more widely accessible - and once more, Hopper had a hand in its creation.

COBOL was a resounding success, in large part because any company wanting to do business with DoD had to use it. One of COBOL's key advantages: It could run on computers made by different manufacturers, which greatly accelerated its adoption by both the military and private industry. By the mid-1960s, Hopper was so famous in Navy circles she no longer had to apply for standard two-week training stints. Instead, at the Navy's request, she spent that time helping naval installations set up their own computing systems. As a teacher, she was finally in her element - until a letter arrived from the chief of naval personnel in 1966: It was time to retire. Although a rebel in the world of computing, Hopper was a faithful naval officer, and on the last day of the year, she reluctantly separated from service.

So much for retirement

Hopper's retirement didn't last long. Seven months later, the Navy called again: Something had to be done about COBOL. In the years since its creation, differing versions of the language had emerged, creating confusion and conflict. Hopper was mustered back into the Navy Reserve and assigned the task of standardizing the Navy's computers, restoring order to its high-level programming languages. The job was to last six months, but she pursued that mission for the next 19 years.

When Hopper retired from the Navy for the third and final time in 1986, at the age of 79, she was the oldest active duty commissioned officer in the Navy. She was awarded the Distinguished Service Medal, one of hundreds of awards she received, on the decks of USS Constitution in Boston Harbor. She promptly went to work as a consultant for Digital Equipment Corp., hitting the lecture circuit to promote careers in computer science.

When she died in 1992 at the age of 85, Hopper left a legacy that will never be eclipsed. Today, her influence has spread around the globe. The Navy today has supercomputers capable of 800 trillion operations a second, direct descendants of the original Mark I. The guided missile destroyer USS Hopper (DDG-70) plies the world's oceans; the Grace Hopper Celebration of Women in Computing conference is held annually; and computer programmers again refer to their job as “coding.” Somewhere, Grace Hopper must be smiling.

Link

I attended one of her lectures in the 1970s and occasionally saw her walking the halls of the Pentagon. It was always amusing to see people do double-takes at the sight of a frail old woman in her (then) Navy captain uniform.

Quite accomplished. I find it interesting that there is little if any info about her personal life out there. Who were her parents? found what nationality? any siblings? 2 sisters and a brother, ever married? any children? hobbies or other interests?, etc.

She married a NYU professor in 1930 but it looks like when she went into the Navy in 1945, things changed and they got divorced.

http://www.public.navy.mil/sur.../Pages/namesake.aspx

She sure advanced computer technology and you have to wonder where we would be today without her contributions.

Interesting story. Thanks for posting.

Here is her family history:

Beginnings

Grace Brewster Murray was born on December 9, 1906 in New York City, USA. Hopper was her married surname.

Her father was Walter Fletcher Murray, an insurance executive; and her mother was the mathematically talented Mary Campbell Van Horne. The couple had three children; Grace was the eldest.

Grace grew up in an academic atmosphere – her parents made sure she had access to all the books she wanted, and they did everything they possibly could to support her curious nature

In 1910, her father held her at the window one evening to see Halley’s Comet, which she thought looked bigger than the full moon. He predicted to his three-year-old daughter that she would live to see the comet return 76 years later.

Appetite for Destruction

Her mother once left seven-year-old Grace unattended, and returned to discover her inquisitive daughter had made a tour of their home, collected seven clocks, and dismantled them all.

Grace had started by dismantling just one clock to investigate its mechanism.

Then she panicked because she didn’t know how to put it together again.

So she got another clock, dismantled it… and you can guess the rest!

Self-reliance, Reading, and School

Grace’s father raised his daughters and his son to value education, self-reliance, and hard work; and he urged them to always pursue their dreams.

A copy of St. Nicholas

Grace’s favorite activity was reading: she learned passages from Rudyard Kipling’s Just So stories by heart, and shared Rachel Carson’s love of the St. Nicholas magazine.

Grace was educated privately at two conservative Presbyterian girls’ schools in New York: The Graham School, from 1912 to 1916; and Miss Mary Schoonmaker’s School, from 1916 to 1923.

In 1923, age 16, she spent a year at Hartridge School, a strictly run boarding school in New Jersey.
College

In 1924, Grace matriculated at Vassar College, a private liberal arts college in Poughkeepsie, New York. Her mother was delighted when Grace went to college; she would have loved to have done this in her own youth, but opportunities for girls were more limited then.

Aged 17, Grace had already decided to major in mathematics. Her professors noticed she was unusually skilled at explaining difficult concepts in math and physics to other students.

Grace graduated in 1928, aged 21, with a Bachelor of Arts degree in mathematics and physics.
Master’s and Marriage

Grace enjoyed academia and won a Vassar scholarship for further study. In 1928, her scholarship took her to graduate school at Yale University in New Haven, Connecticut.

Two years later, two significant things happened:

Yale awarded her a master’s degree in mathematics
She married Vincent Hopper, an academic whose field was literature

The newly married couple sailed with Grace’s family on an eight week honeymoon touring Great Britain and mainland Europe.
Academia in Difficult Times

The Great Depression had begun in 1928, and by 1931 over 8 million Americans were unemployed – the unemployment rate was 16 percent.

Times were hard, and Grace Hopper was delighted to accept work as a mathematics assistant at Vassar College in 1931. She decided to take a fresh approach to courses and incorporated ideas from other subjects such as chemistry. Her new approach was rewarded with a surge in the number of students taking math courses.

I brought in new texts… and above all new applications. I began dumping in a little non-Euclidean geometry… all the Einstein stuff was brand new and exciting, and it was fun to try and bring it into the courses.

Passionate about mathematics, Hopper submitted a thesis entitled The Irreducibility of Algebraic Equations to Yale and, age 27, got her Ph.D. in 1934.

She continued working at Vassar, where a series of promotions carried her through the positions of instructor, assistant professor, and, in 1941, associate professor.

However, in the year she became an associate professor, events outside academia took a turn for the worse:

Grace separated from her husband. (They divorced in 1945. Vincent became a professor of literature at New York University and died in 1976.)
America went to war!

The Military

Following Japan’s attack on Pearl Harbor in November 1941, Hopper tried to join the military. She was refused, because she was too light for her height, and anyway her job training mathematicians at Vassar was thought too important for her to abandon.

Hopper was persistent about joining the military. In December 1943, Vassar College agreed to give her temporary leave. She joined the Naval Reserve after applying successfully for a waiver on her weight. She would later tell anyone in the military who was refused permission for anything to apply for a waiver – there were waivers for most things.

She trained at the Women’s Midshipman School in Northampton, Massachusetts where, age 37, she lived four to a room with much younger recruits.

Training was intentionally very demanding; recruits were expected to deal with harsh conditions and pressure situations. Hopper enjoyed the experience enormously. She achieved the highest training rank – battalion commander – and graduated first in her class in June 1944.
Grace Hopper and Computing Science
Early Computer Science

After graduation, Lieutenant Grace Hopper was assigned to Commander Howard Aiken’s Computation Laboratory at Harvard University, in Cambridge, Massachusetts, beginning July 2, 1944.

Grace Hopper

Hopper quickly won the respect of Aiken and the other members of his team, who were working on the Harvard Mark I computer. The 51 feet (15.5 meters) long computer was Aiken’s brainchild and had been built by IBM.

It was electromechanical, meaning it was powered by electricity and performed calculations using punch card instructions and moving mechanical parts. It utilized computing principles first worked out by Charles Babbage and Ada Lovelace in the 1800s.

The Mark I could perform in a day calculations that had previously taken a month. It ran 24/7. Its operators, including Hopper, often slept beside the machine, repairing it when things went wrong.

Hopper’s first major project was calculating gunnery tables needed by the Navy to aim their new guns accurately, taking account of conditions such as wind speed, weight of shell, and air density. Assembling gunnery tables involved a huge number of calculations – an ideal job for a computer.

Hopper learned a lot at Harvard, developing her computer expertise to a level matched by few other people.

In September 1947, a moth landed in one of the Mark II computer’s mechanical relays, causing the relay to fail. Someone removed the moth, so the computer was ‘debugged.’ The word already existed in computing, but Hopper and her colleagues thought it was hilarious that they were the first people to literally debug a computer.
computer bug - moth

Continued here:

https://www.famousscientists.org/grace-murray-hopper/
41

Thanks for all that, 41.

I am certainly grateful for Adm. Grace Hopper. I programmed in COBOL for 31 years and much of the coding I wrote is still running after 40 years. COBOL is anything but dead.

flashguy

quote:

Originally posted by sigfreund:
Thanks for all that, 41.

Ditto

Thank you for this,really an enjoyable read about a special lady.

A long time ago I attended a lecture by ADM Hopper.

She was talking about the speed of computing, and handed out a 1 foot piece of telephone wire to each of us, explaining that it represented 1 nanosecond travel at the speed of light.

A very smart lady...

Amazing Grace. She has always been one of my heroes. Love the "bug" history.

I've heard of her.

As I understand it, one of the primary uses of COBOL by the Navy was for supply logistics and material planning.

quote:

Originally posted by sigfreund:

. . . .The Amazing Grace Hopper . . .

sigfreund, thank you immensely for the reminder of such a great lady. Occasionally, we are placed together with such people - people we can only revel, remember, and be quite thankful and appreciative that we have crossed paths with such a spirit..

quote:

Originally posted by 41:
. . . The Amazing Grace Hopper . . .

http://www.public.navy.mil/sur.../Pages/namesake.aspx

. Continued . .

https://www.famousscientists.org/grace-murray-hopper/
41

41

Thank you also for the additional facets of Grace's lifetime -

She was a constant mention when attending an AN/YUK-5(V) programming class at Naval Supply Corps School in Athens GA back in 1975.

quote:

Originally posted by 41:
She sure advanced computer technology and you have to wonder where we would be today without her contributions.

Likely in the same place we are today. Somebody else would have stepped up.

Not to belittle her contributions, mind you, but a vacuum will be filled.

quote:

Originally posted by bald1:
She was a constant mention when attending an AN/YUK-5(V) programming class at Naval Supply Corps School in Athens GA back in 1975.

Bald - you were a pork chop? I was there in 1986 as a student, and again as an instructor 1989-1991. Sliders and pitchers of beer at Allen's... when I was there, that was the preferred venue for REM to play warming up for tours.

quote:

Originally posted by feersum dreadnaught:

quote:

Originally posted by bald1:
She was a constant mention when attending an AN/YUK-5(V) programming class at Naval Supply Corps School in Athens GA back in 1975.

Bald - you were a pork chop? I was there in 1986 as a student, and again as an instructor 1989-1991. Sliders and pitchers of beer at Allen's... when I was there, that was the preferred venue for REM to play warming up for tours.

\
Indeed I was a "pork chop" but quite a bit before your time... 1975. Had a wild time there

If I recall correctly during a 60 Minutes interview she was asked about managing software projects. Her reponse was along the lines of "the Marines teach you to lead men not manage them." Sadly this is something that most of the software industry never took to heart.