Grace Murray Hopper
From VCencylopedia
Computer pioneer, mathematician, and teacher Grace Murray Hopper recalled seeing her first computer, the UNIVAC “thinking machine”: “When I walked in and saw that monster, I was scared to death!” She had every right to be frightened; the machine consisted of 200 miles of wiring and 5000 tubes, stood eight feet high, was fourteen feet long and seven feet wide. Besides its size, the UNIVAC was menacing because computers were still an enigma in 1951. Hopper, often called “the grandmother of the computer age,” played a crucial role in developing modern computer technology and creating COBOL, a computer language that brought technology from the realm of mathematics into the world of business and everyday use.
Grace Brewster Murray was born in New York City in 1906. She entered Vassar College in 1924, concentrating in physics and mathematics. According to Hopper, most of the women at Vassar during that time had no other goal than to get married, and those who sought careers solely looked to teaching. Hopper herself envisioned a future as an actuary or a teacher. She tutored many students in math and physics at Vassar, and found that she was quite good at teaching. Her inspirations at Vassar were two math professors, Gertrude Smith and Henry Seely White, whom she affectionately referred as “Pop White.” Hopper also took many courses outside her concentrations: economics, public finance, botany, physiology, geology, and electronics. She graduated from Vassar in 1928 with honors in physics and math and went on to study mathematics at Yale on a Vassar fellowship. She married Vincent Foster Hopper in 1930 and graduated from Yale in the same year with a master of arts in mathematics.
In 1931, she was offered a salary of $800 a year to teach math at Vassar, and she and her husband moved to Poughkeepsie. The thirteen years she spent as faculty member at Vassar were fruitful. Her innovative and gregarious nature made her classes popular; in one course she invented an entire mythical country to literally “animate” a dry mechanical drawing class. Hopper’s program of self-education also continued. She finished her doctoral thesis for Yale in absentia at Vassar and received a Ph.D. in 1934, taught herself several languages, and audited numerous courses at the college: astronomy, geology, philosophy, bacteriology, biology, zoology, plant horticulture and architecture, to name a few. Hopper’s wide knowledge in many disciplines led to her appreciation of each discipline’s unique language and symbols. Later in her career, she became interested in how computers could be used for a whole range of fields, not just in mathematics but in other sciences, for example.
World War II changed Hopper’s life and career path. In 1941 Hopper and her husband separated (finally divorcing in 1945), and she was busy juggling an assistant professorship at Vassar, a part-time teaching position at Barnard, and a faculty study fellowship at New York University’s Courant Institute for Mathematics. The creation of the Navy Women’s Reserve piqued Hopper’s interest and patriotic spirit. Rejected in 1942 for not weighing enough, she was finally admitted in December of 1943 into the WAVES (Women Accepted for Volunteer Emergency Services) and in 1944 was commissioned as a lieutenant junior grade, thus beginning her forty-two year career with the Navy, and her life-long relationship with computers. Hopper was immediately assigned to Howard Aiken's Bureau of Ordinance Computation Project at Harvard University to work with on the Mark II, which the Navy had commissioned as a successor to the first large-scale automatic digital computer. In 1947 the Mark II began to malfunction: a moth had flown in and died in its interior. Hopper taped the dead insect in her log book, and, picking up an informal engineering term for mechanical glitches, she and her colleagues launched the word "bug" as it appled to computers.
The bug from Mark II, in Hopper's log book
After the war, Hopper remained in the Naval Reserve and joined the Sperry Rand Corp, where she worked on the UNIVAC, the first commercial large-scale electronic computer. There she invented the “compiler,” a program which allowed for the computer programmer to “tell” the computer to manufacture its own program. The first version of Hopper’s compiler, the A-0, translated computer code into machine code. Her next compiler, the B-0, or FLOW-MATIC, allowed for the computer to recognize English commands, and was put into use in businesses for payroll calculation and automated billing. Eventually Hopper’s work with the UNIVAC led her to formulate COBOL, a universal computer programming language. Hopper stayed on at Sperry Rand until 1971, working on new versions of computing systems, programming, and educating others about computer language.
Hopper briefly retired from the Navy in 1966, only to be called back for active duty in 1967 to standardize COBOL for the Navy. Eventually attaining the rank of admiral, Hopper served until 1986, retiring as the oldest active-duty Navy officer. She died in 1992 at the age of 85. In 1996 the U.S.S. Hopper, a navy ship named in her honor, was launched. This event perhaps literally realized the advice she often gave to young people, whom she had been tirelessly dedicated to teaching all her life: “A ship in port is safe, but that is not what ships are for. Be good ships. Sail out to sea and do new things.”
Related Articles
External Links
Sources
Billings, Charlene W. Grace Hopper: Navy Admiral and Computer Pioneer. Hillside: Enslow Publishers, 1989.
“Grace Hopper, Vassar alumna and computer pioneer, dies.” The Poughkeepsie Journal. 4 January 1992.
“Thinking Machine Tamer,” THIS WEEK magazine. 4 December 1955.
Biographical folder in the Vassar College Archives
Williams, Kathleen Broome. Grace Hopper: Admiral of the Cyber Sea. Annapolis: Naval Institute Press, 2004.
LM 2005
