AdaLovelaceDay09 - Grace Murray Hopper
Today’s post is my pledge for Ada Lovelace Day. “What’s that,” you ask? Well:
Ada Lovelace Day is an international day of blogging to draw attention to women excelling in technology.
Women’s contributions often go unacknowledged, their innovations seldom mentioned, their faces rarely recognised. We want you to tell the world about these unsung heroines. Whatever she does, whether she is a sysadmin or a tech entrepreneur, a programmer or a designer, developing software or hardware, a tech journalist or a tech consultant, we want to celebrate her achievements.
So, let me tell you about one of the coolest nerds ever:
Grace Murray Hopper
Hopper began teaching mathematics at Vassar in 1931, and by 1941 she was an associate professor. A few years later she joined the Navy and went to work figuring out how to shave a few nanoseconds off of projectile trajectory calculations, which eventually lead her to working on cutting-edge research on the Computation Project at Harvard University. She was an early programmer of the Mark I (only partially pictured below) and wrote some good white papers… but for my money the coolest stuff was yet to come.
In 1949 she got to work on UNIVAC! For those of you unaware, UNIVAC was the world’s first commercially available computer. Not only did Hopper help in the general development of the machine, but she wrote its very first compiler. Before Hopper, the UNIVAC had to be programmed in machine code! God, I’m just geeking out all over the place here… let me catch my breath…
a model of UNIVAC I
Now sure, that’s enough for any self-respecting level 60 Nerd to accomplish, but that wasn’t the end. She kept developing compilers, really pushing for this idea that programs should be written in something that looked a little closer to English than machine. Eventually the CODASYL committee took her latest work, the FLOW-MATIC compiler, and expanded it to invent COBOL. “Who cares about COBOL,” you ask? Here, lemme Wikipedia it for ya:
In 1997, the Gartner Group reported that 80% of the world’s business ran on COBOL with over 200 billion lines of code in existence and with an estimated 5 billion lines of new code annually.
So no Hopper, no COBOL. Wow.
Now for something Wikipedia doesn’t mention: she found the first computer bug. Well, she coined the term. Reading between the lines I get the feeling they used to just assume it was bugs getting stuck in the relays, until one day she found a moth smashed in there. She taped it in her notebook with the comment: “The first actual case of a bug being found.”
Was that all? No, but if I told you the rest I’d have to kill you. Or rather… I actually don’t know much about the rest. She kept being pulled out of retirement by the military over and over for projects there aren’t many public details on, progressing up the ranks to Rear Admiral. She died while she was working as a consultant for DEC in 1992 at the age of 85.
What a lifetime of achievement. She was there at the birth of it all. Hell, she helped in the delivery.
Grace Hopper, we salute you!
