The Hundredth Anniversary of the Birth of Grace Hopper
By
Frederik Nebeker
One of the most important figures
in 20th-century computing is Grace Hopper. Born Grace Murray in
New York City on 9 December 1906, she graduated from Vassar in
1928, having majored in both math and physics. Two years later,
she earned an M.A. in mathematics at Yale and married Vincent
Hopper. In 1931, she began teaching at Vassar, while still
working on her Ph.D., which she received in 1934. In 1943, she
left her position as associate professor at Vassar to join the
Women Accepted for Voluntary Emergency Service (WAVES), the
women's auxiliary service of the U.S. Navy. She was assigned to
the Bureau of Ships Computation Project at Harvard, where she
worked with the Mark I, an electromechanical digital computer,
and became one of the first computer programmers in the world.
After the war, she stayed on as a
research fellow at the Harvard Computation Laboratory. In 1949,
she went to work for the Eckert-Mauchly Corporation, and in 1952,
she became Director of Automatic Programming for the UNIVAC
Division of Sperry Rand (which had acquired the Eckert-Mauchly
company). Hopper was one of the originators of high-level
programming languages, completing one of the first
compilers in 1952. Five years later, she completed a compiler for FLOW-MATIC
— the first compiler for an English-language business
data-processing language. FLOW-MATIC had a large influence on
COBOL, which became the most widely used programming language
for business applications. Hopper was one of the early members
of the Association of Computing Machinery (ACM). In 1957, she
edited the ACM Glossary of Computing Terms — the
first authoritative dictionary of computing.
Hopper had remained a member of the
Navy Reserve, and in 1967, the Navy recalled her to active duty.
There she worked on various computer-applications, and led
the effort to standardize programming languages for the
military. She eventually attained the rank of real admiral — the
first woman to do so. When she retired in 1989, at the age of 79,
she was the oldest serving officer in all the armed forces. In
1962, Hopper was named an IEEE Fellow "for contributions in the
field of automatic programming." In 1991, President George Bush
presented her with the National Medal of Technology "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."
She received some 40 honorary doctorates, and a U.S. warship was
named in her honor. She continued to work as consultant until
her death on New Year's Day in 1992.
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