Grace Murray Hopper was an American computer scientist and United States Navy rear admiral.
A pioneer in the field, she was one of the first programmers of the Harvard Mark I computer,
and developed the first compiler for a computer programming language. She popularized the
idea of machine-independent programming languages, which led to the development of COBOL, one
of the first modern programming languages. She is credited with popularizing the term
"debugging" for fixing computer glitches. Owing to the breadth of her accomplishments
and her naval rank, she is sometimes referred to as "Amazing Grace". The U.S. Navy destroyer
USS Hopper is named for her, as was the Cray XE6 "Hopper" supercomputer at NERSC.
Early life and education Hopper was born Grace Brewster Murray in New
York City. She was the oldest in a family of three children. She was curious as a child,
a lifelong trait; at the age of seven she decided to determine how an alarm clock worked,
and dismantled seven alarm clocks before her mother realized what she was doing. For her
preparatory school education, she attended the Hartridge School in Plainfield, New Jersey.
Rejected for early admission to Vassar College at age 16, she was admitted the following
year. She graduated Phi Beta Kappa from Vassar in 1928 with a bachelor's degree in mathematics
and physics and earned her master's degree at Yale University in 1930.
In 1934, she earned a Ph.D. in mathematics from Yale under the direction of Øystein
Ore. Her dissertation, New Types of Irreducibility Criteria, was published that same year. Hopper
began teaching mathematics at Vassar in 1931, and was promoted to associate professor in
1941. She was married to New York University professor
Vincent Foster Hopper from 1930 until their divorce in 1945. She never remarried, and
she kept his surname. Career
World War II In 1943, during World War II, Hopper obtained
a leave of absence from Vassar and was sworn into the United States Navy Reserve, one of
many women to volunteer to serve in the WAVES. She had to get an exemption to enlist; she
was 15 pounds below the Navy minimum weight of 120 pounds. She reported in December and
trained at the Naval Reserve Midshipmen's School at Smith College in Northampton, Massachusetts.
Hopper graduated first in her class in 1944, and was assigned to the Bureau of Ships Computation
Project at Harvard University as a lieutenant, junior grade. She served on the Mark I computer
programming staff headed by Howard H. Aiken. Hopper and Aiken coauthored three papers on
the Mark I, also known as the Automatic Sequence Controlled Calculator. Hopper's request to
transfer to the regular Navy at the end of the war was declined due to her age. She continued
to serve in the Navy Reserve. Hopper remained at the Harvard Computation Lab until 1949,
turning down a full professorship at Vassar in favor of working as a research fellow under
a Navy contract at Harvard. UNIVAC
In 1949, Hopper became an employee of the Eckert–Mauchly Computer Corporation as a
senior mathematician 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. In 1952 she had an operational compiler. "Nobody
believed that," she said. "I had a running compiler and nobody would touch it. They told
me computers could only do arithmetic." In 1954 Hopper was named the company's first
director of automatic programming, and her department released some of the first compiler-based
programming languages, including MATH-MATIC and FLOW-MATIC.
COBOL
In the spring of 1959, a two-day conference known as the Conference on Data Systems Languages
brought together computer experts from industry and government. Hopper served as the technical
consultant to the committee, and many of her former employees served on the short-term
committee that defined the new language COBOL. The new language extended Hopper's FLOW-MATIC
language with some ideas from the IBM equivalent, COMTRAN. Hopper's belief that programs should
be written in a language that was close to English was captured in the new business language,
and COBOL went on to be the most ubiquitous business language to date.
From 1967 to 1977, Hopper served as the director of the Navy Programming Languages Group in
the Navy's Office of Information Systems Planning and was promoted to the rank of captain in
1973. She developed validation software for COBOL and its compiler as part of a COBOL
standardization program for the entire Navy. Standards
In the 1970s, Hopper advocated for the Defense Department to replace large, centralized systems
with networks of small, distributed computers. Any user on any computer node could access
common databases located on the network. 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 were assumed by the National Bureau of Standards, known today
as the National Institute of Standards and Technology.
Retirement
Hopper retired from the Naval Reserve at age 60, in accordance with Navy attrition regulations,
with the rank of commander at the end of 1966. She was recalled to active duty in August
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 Republican Representative 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. She remained on active duty for several years beyond mandatory retirement
by special approval of Congress. In 1985, the rank of commodore was renamed rear admiral,
lower half. She retired 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 decoration awarded by the Department of Defense. At the
time of her retirement, she was the oldest active-duty commissioned officer in the United
States Navy, and aboard the oldest commissioned 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. During many of her lectures, she illustrated a nanosecond using salvaged
obsolete Bell System 25 pair telephone cable, cut it to 11.8 inch lengths, the distance
that light travels in one nanosecond, and handed out the individual wires to her listeners.
Although no longer a serving officer, she always wore her Navy full dress uniform to
these lectures.
"The most important thing I've accomplished, other than building the compiler, is training
young people. They come to me, you know, and say, "Do you think we can do this?" I say,
"Try it." And I back 'em up. They need that. I keep track of them as they get older and
I stir 'em up at intervals so they don't forget to take chances."
She was interred with full military honors in Arlington National Cemetery.
Awards and recognition 1969: Hopper was awarded the inaugural "computer
sciences 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.
1982: She received the American Association of University Women Achievement Award.
1985: She received an Honorary Doctor of Letters from Western New England College.
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 was launched. Nicknamed Amazing Grace, it is on a very short list of U.S.
military vessels named after women. 2001: Eavan Boland wrote a poem dedicated
to Grace Hopper titled "Code" in her 2001 release Against Love Poetry.
2001: The Gracies, the Government Technology Leadership Award were named in her honor.
2009: The Department of Energy's National Energy Research Scientific Computing Center
named its flagship system "Hopper". 2013: Google made the Google Doodle for Hopper's
107th birthday an animation of her sitting at a computer, using COBOL to print out her
age. At the end of the animation, a moth flies out of the computer.
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 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, United States, dedicated their computer lab to her in 1985, calling it the
Grace Murray Hopper Center for Computer Learning. The academy bestows a Grace Murray Hopper
Prize to a graduate who excelled in the field of computer systems. Hopper had spent her
childhood summers at a family home in Wolfeboro. An administration building on Naval Support
Activity Annapolis in Annapolis, Maryland is named the Grace Hopper Building in her
honor. Building 1482 aboard Naval Air Station North
Island, housing the Naval Computer and Telecommunication Station San Diego, is named the Grace Hopper
Building. Building 6007, C2/CNT West, Command, control,
communications, computers, intelligence, surveillance and reconnaissance, or C4ISR, Center of Excellence
in Aberdeen Proving Ground, Maryland is named the Rear Admiral Grace Hopper Building.
A named professorship in the Department of Computer Sciences was established at Yale
University in her honor. Joan Feigenbaum was named to this chair in 2008.
Grace Hopper's legacy was an inspiring factor in the creation of the Grace Hopper Celebration
of Women in Computing. Held yearly, this conference is designed to bring the research and career
interests of women in computing to the forefront. A bridge over Goose Creek joining the north
and south sides of the Naval Support Activity Charleston side of Joint Base Charleston,
South Carolina is named the Grace Hopper Memorial Bridge in her honor.
Grace Hopper was awarded 40 honorary degrees from universities worldwide during her lifetime.
Anecdotes
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. She also received the nickname
"Grandma COBOL". While she was working on a Mark II Computer
at a US Navy research lab in Dahlgren, Virginia in 1947, 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 bug had been in use for many years in engineering to refer
to small glitches and inexplicable problems, Admiral Hopper 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 used to ask her why satellite
communication took so long. She started handing out pieces of wire that were just under one
foot long—the distance that light travels in one nanosecond. She gave these pieces of
wire the metonym "nanoseconds." She was careful to tell her audience that the length of her
nanoseconds was actually the maximum speed the signals would travel in a vacuum, and
that signals would travel more slowly through the actual wires that were her teaching aids.
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 that she called picoseconds. Jay Elliot described Grace Hopper as appearing
to be "'all Navy', but when you reach inside, you find a 'Pirate' dying to be released".
Obituary notices Betts, Mitch
Bromberg, Howard Danca, Richard A.
Hancock, Bill Power, Kevin
Sammet, J. E.: 128–131, 1992) Weiss, Eric A.
See also
Systems engineering Women in computing
Women in the United States Navy References
Further reading Beyer, Kurt W.. Grace Hopper and the Invention
of the Information Age. Cambridge, Massachusetts: MIT Press. ISBN 978-0-262-01310-9.
Marx, Christy. Grace Hopper: the first woman to program the first computer in the United
States. Women hall of famers in mathematics and science. New York City: Rosen Publishing
Group. ISBN 978-0-8239-3877-3. Williams, Kathleen Broome. Grace Hopper: Admiral
of the Cyber Sea. Annapolis, Maryland: Naval Institute Press. ISBN 978-1-55750-952-9.
Williams, Kathleen Broome. Improbable Warriors: Women Scientists and the U.S. Navy in World
War II. Annapolis, Maryland: Naval Institute Press. ISBN 978-1-55750-961-1. Williams'
book focuses on the lives and contributions of four notable women scientists: Mary Sears;
Florence van Straten; Grace Murray Hopper; Mina Spiegel Rees.
External links Extensive Grace Hopper Biography and Images
from the United States Navy Naval Historical Center
Grace Hopper links at the Wayback Machine from Chips, the United States Navy information
technology magazine "Grace Murray Hopper", Biographies of Women
Mathematicians, Agnes Scott College O'Connor, John J.; Robertson, Edmund F., "Grace
Hopper", MacTutor History of Mathematics archive, University of St Andrews .
www.GraceHopper.org site for the annual Grace Hopper Celebration of Women in Computing
Grace Murray Hopper Award Grace Hopper at the Mathematics Genealogy
Project Schlesinger Library Luncheon Series. Audio
collection, 1979–1987: A Finding Aid. Schlesinger Library, Radcliffe Institute, Harvard University.
Grace Hopper on Letterman Memorable Quotes