Everything about Grace Hopper totally explained
Rear Admiral Grace Murray Hopper (
December 9 1906 –
January 1 1992) was an American
computer scientist and
United States Navy officer. A pioneer in the field, she was one of the first
programmers of the
Harvard Mark I calculator, and she developed the first
compiler for a
computer programming language. Because of the breadth of her accomplishments and her naval rank, she's sometimes referred to as "Amazing Grace".
Early life and education
Hopper was born
Grace Brewster Murray in
New York City. For her prep school education, Hopper attended the
Hartridge School in
Plainfield, NJ. She married Vincent Hopper (a Ph.D. in English who for many years was chairman of the NYU English department) in
1930, but they were 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 titled
New Types of Irreducibility Criteria. Hopper began teaching mathematics at
Vassar in
1931, and by
1941 she was an
associate professor.
UNIVAC
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.
COBOL
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 languages close to machine code (such as
assembly language), which is how it was normally done at that time. It is fair to say that COBOL was based very much on her philosophy.
Standards
In the 1970s, she pioneered the implementation of
standards for testing computer systems and components, most significantly for early
programming languages such as
FORTRAN and
COBOL. The Navy tests for conformance to these standards led to significant convergence among the programming language
dialects of the major computer vendors. In the 1980s, these tests (and their official administration) were assumed by the National Bureau of Standards (NBS), known today as the
National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST).
Retirement
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
H.J.RES.341
a joint
resolution in the
House of Representatives which led to her promotion to
Commodore by special Presidential appointment. In 1985, the rank of Commodore was renamed
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 non-combat award possible by the Department of Defense. At the moment of her retirement, she was the oldest officer in the United States Navy, and aboard the oldest ship in the United States Navy.
She was then hired as a senior consultant to
Digital Equipment Corporation, a position she retained until her death in
1992, aged 85.
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's 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.
She was laid to rest with full military honors in
Arlington National Cemetery; Section 59, grave 973.
Honors
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) was launched. Nicknamed Amazing Grace, it's on a very short list of U.S. military vessels named after women.
The Fleet Numerical Meteorology and Oceanography Center is located at 7 Grace Hopper Avenue in Monterey, California.
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.
Brewster Academy, a school located in Wolfeboro, New Hampshire, USA, dedicated their computer lab to her in 1985, calling it the Grace Murray Hopper Center for Computer Learning. Hopper had spent her childhood summers at a family home in Wolfeboro.
An administration building on Naval Support Activity Annapolis (Previously known as Naval Station Annapolis) in Annapolis, Maryland is named "The Grace Hopper Building" in her honor.
Anecdotes
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 can't 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's to get permission" is often attributed to Grace Hopper.
Also attributed to her is the quote, "A ship in a harbor is safe, but that isn't what a ship is built for."
During the same interview, she was asked if she's an open mind. She replied, "I believe in having an open mind, but not so open that your brains fall out."
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)Further Information
Get more info on 'Grace Hopper'.
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