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Grace Murray Hopper
December 9, 1906 (1906-12-09) – January 1, 1992 (1992-02) (aged 85)
Grace Hopper
Place of birth	New York City, New York
Place of death	Arlington, Virginia
Place of burial	Arlington National Cemetery
Allegiance	United States of America
Service/branch	United States Navy
Years of service	1943-1966, 1967-1971, 1972-1986.
Rank	Rear Admiral
Awards	Defense Distinguished Service Medal Legion of Merit Meritorious Service Medal American Campaign Medal World War II Victory Medal National Defense Service Medal Armed Forces Reserve Medal with two Hourglass Devices Naval Reserve Medal

Rear Admiral Grace Murray Hopper (December 9, 1906 – January 1, 1992) was an American computer scientist and United States Naval officer. A pioneer in the field, she was one of the first programmers of the Harvard Mark I computer, and she developed the first compiler for a computer programming language.^{[1][2][3][4][5]} She conceptualized the idea of machine-independent programming languages, which led to the development of COBOL, one of the first modern programming languages. She is also credited with popularizing the term "debugging" for fixing computer glitches (motivated by an actual moth removed from the computer). Because of the breadth of her accomplishments and her naval rank, she is sometimes referred to as "Amazing Grace". The U.S. Navy destroyer USS Hopper (DDG-70) was named for her.

Early life and education

Hopper was born Grace Brewster Murray in New York City. For her preparatory school education, she attended the Hartridge School in Plainfield, New Jersey. She applied for early admission to Vassar College at age 16, but was rejected (her test scores in Latin were too low); she was admitted the next year. 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. She married Dr. Vincent Hopper (a Ph.D. in English who for many years was chairman of the NYU English department) in 1930. In 1934, she earned a Ph.D. in mathematics from Yale.^[6] Her dissertation was titled New Types of Irreducibility Criteria.^[7] Hopper began teaching mathematics at Vassar in 1931, and by 1941 she was an associate professor. Grace and Vincent Hopper divorced in 1945, although she kept his surname. She never remarried.

World War II Naval Service

In 1943, Hopper obtained a leave of absence from Vassar and was sworn in to 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,II,II 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 (38). She continued to serve in the United States 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.^[8]

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. Later versions were released commercially as the ARITH-MATIC, MATH-MATIC and FLOW-MATIC compilers.

COBOL

COBOL was defined by the CODASYL committee which extended Hopper's 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.

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.^[8] She developed validation software for the programming language COBOL and its compiler as part of a COBOL standardization program for the entire Navy.^[8]

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

Grace Hopper (January 1984)

Hopper retired from the Naval Reserve 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 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.^[9] 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.^[10]

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. Although she was an interesting and competent speaker, the most memorable part of these talks was her illustration of a nanosecond. She salvaged obsolete Bell System 25 pair telephone cable, cut it to 11.8 inch (30 cm) lengths (which is 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.

She was laid to rest with full military honors in Arlington National Cemetery; Section 59, grave 973.^[11]

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 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"

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, United States, 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

Photo of first computer bug

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 Harvard University 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 computer bug cannot be definitively attributed to Admiral Hopper, she did bring the term into popularity.^[12] 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.^[13]
• 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.^[14]

Notable Quotations

• The famous quotation "It's easier to ask forgiveness than it is to get permission" is often attributed to Grace Hopper.^[15]

Obituary Notices

• 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 (4): 128–131, 1992)
• Weiss, Eric A. (IEEE Annals of the History of Computing 14: 56–58, 1992)

See also

Software Testing portal

World War II portal

United States Navy portal

• Women in computing
• Systems engineering
• Women in the United States Navy

References

Further reading

• Beyer, Kurt W. (2009-09-30). Grace Hopper and the Invention of the Information Age (1st ed.). Cambridge, Massachusetts: The MIT Press. ISBN 978-0262013109. 
• Williams, Kathleen Broome (2004-11-15). Grace Hopper: Admiral of the Cyber Sea (1st ed.). Annapolis, Maryland: Naval Institute Press. ISBN 978-1557509529. 
• Marx, Christy (August 2003). Grace Hopper: the first woman to program the first computer in the United States. Women hall of famers in mathematics and science (1st ed.). New York City: Rosen Publishing Group. ISBN 978-0823938773. 
• Williams, Kathleen Broome (2001). Improbable Warriors: Women Scientists and the U.S. Navy in World War II. Annapolis, Maryland: Naval Institute Press. ISBN 9781557509611.  Williams' book focuses on the lives and contributions of four notable women scientists: Mary Sears (1905–1997); Florence van Straten (1913–1992); Grace Murray Hopper (1906–1992); Mina Spiegel Rees (1902–1997).

External links

• Extensive Grace Hopper Biography and Images from the United States Navy Naval Historical Center
• Grace Hopper links 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, http://www-history.mcs.st-andrews.ac.uk/Biographies/Hopper.html .
• A shorter Hopper biography, which unfortunately perpetuates the myth that she coined the term "computer bug".
• Biography and Wit and Wisdom from a Yale website
• www.GraceHopper.org site for the annual Grace Hopper Celebration of Women in Computing
• www.hopper.navy.mil Official United States Navy website for the USS Hopper, which includes a biography of Hopper
• Rear Admiral Grace Hopper with pages about the lady and the ship named after her
• Grace Murray Hopper Award
• The Government Technology Leadership Awards: The Gracies
• Biography from the San Diego Supercomputer Center
• More details and photos from the moth/bug in the Mark II
• Grace Hopper at the Mathematics Genealogy Project
• Grace Hopper at Find a Grave Retrieved on 2008-07-26

From Wikiquote

It's easier to ask forgiveness than it is to get permission.

Rear Admiral Grace Hopper (9 December 1906 – 1 January 1992) U.S. Naval officer, and an early computer programmer; developer of the first compiler for a computer programming language.

Sourced

From then on, when anything went wrong with a computer, we said it had bugs in it.

• To me programming is more than an important practical art. It is also a gigantic undertaking in the foundations of knowledge.
  • As quoted in Management and the Computer of the Future (1962) by Sloan School of Management, p. 277

• From then on, when anything went wrong with a computer, we said it had bugs in it.
  • On the removal of a 2-inch-long moth from the Harvard Mark I experimental computer at Harvard in August 1945, as quoted in Time (16 April 1984)

• A ship in port is safe; but that is not what ships are built for. Sail out to sea and do new things.
  • As quoted in "Grace Hopper : The Youthful Teacher of Us All" by Henry S. Tropp in Abacus Vol. 2, Issue 1 (Fall 1984) ISSN 0724-6722

• It's easier to ask forgiveness than it is to get permission.
  • As quoted in U.S. Navy's Chips Ahoy magazine (July 1986)

• I handed my passport to the immigration officer, and he looked at it and looked at me and said, "What are you?"
  • On being the oldest active-duty officer in the U.S. military, in an interview on 60 Minutes (24 August 1986)

• In total desperation, I called over to the engineering building, and I said, "Please cut off a nanosecond and send it over to me."
  • On demonstrating a billionth of a second of electricity travel with a piece of wire, in an interview on 60 Minutes (24 August 1986)

• At the end of about a week, I called back and said, "I need something to compare this to. Could I please have a microsecond?"
  • On demonstrating a billionth of a second of electricity travel with a piece of wire, in an interview on 60 Minutes (24 August 1986)

• I had a running compiler and nobody would touch it. ... they carefully told me, computers could only do arithmetic; they could not do programs.
  • As quoted in Grace Hopper : Navy Admiral and Computer Pioneer (1989) by Charlene W. Billings, p. 74 ISBN 089490194X

The Wit and Wisdom of Grace Hopper (1987)

"The Wit and Wisdom of Grace Hopper" by Philip Schieber in OCLC Newsletter, No. 167 (March/April 1987)

• Life was simple before World War II. After that, we had systems.

• Humans are allergic to change. They love to say, "We've always done it this way." I try to fight that. That's why I have a clock on my wall that runs counter-clockwise.
  • Unsourced variant: The most dangerous phrase in the language is, "We've always done it this way."

• We're flooding people with information. We need to feed it through a processor. A human must turn information into intelligence or knowledge. We've tended to forget that no computer will ever ask a new question.

• You manage things, you lead people. We went overboard on management and forgot about leadership. It might help if we ran the MBAs out of Washington.

Unsourced

• I've always been more interested in the future than in the past.

Disputed

• The wonderful thing about standards is that there are so many of them to choose from.
  • Attributed to Hopper, without source, in The UNIX-HATERS Handbook (1994), edited by Simson Garfinkel, Daniel Weise, and Steven Strassmann (ISBN 1-56884-203-1), p. 9, this is most commonly attributed to Andrew Tanenbaum, as it appears in his book Computer Networks (1981), p. 168, but has also been attributed to Patricia Seybold and Ken Olsen.

Quotes about Hopper

• But Grace, then anyone will be able to write programs!
  • Widely reported quote regarding the development of COBOL circa 1954, but as yet unsourced.

External links

Wikipedia has an article about:

Grace Hopper

• Wit and Wisdom of Grace Hopper