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Admiral Grace Murry
Hopper
From 1943 until her death on New Year's Day in 1992, Admiral Grace Murray
Hopper was intimately involved with computing. In 1991 she was awarded 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." Admiral
Hopper was born Grace Brewster Murray in New York City on December 9, 1906. She attended Vassar and received a Ph.D. in mathematics from Yale. For the next 10 years she taught mathematics at
Vassar.
In 1943 Admiral Hopper joined the U.S. Navy and was assigned to the Bureau of Ordnance
Computation Project at Harvard University as a programmer on the Mark 1. After the war, she
remained at Harvard as a faculty member and continued work on the navy's Mark II and Mark III
computers. In 1949 she joined Eckert-Mauchly Computer Corporation and worked on the UNIVAC 1.
It was there that she made a legendary contribution to computing: she discovered the first
computer "bug"—a moth caught in the hardware.
Admiral Hopper had a working compiler in 1952, at a time when the conventional wisdom was
that computers could do only arithmetic. Although not on the committee that designed the
computer language COBOL, she was active in its design, implementation, and use. COBOL
(which stands for COmon Business-Oriented Language) was developed in the early 1960s and still
is widely used in business data processing.
Admiral Hopper retired from the navy in 1966, only to be recalled within a year to full-time
active duty. Admiral Hopper's mission in the navy was to oversee the navy's efforts at
maintaining uniformity in programming languages. It has been said that just as Admiral Hyman
Rickover was the father of the nuclear navy. Rear Admiral Hopper was the mother of computerized
data automation in the navy. She served with the Naval Data Automation Command until she retired
again in 1986 with the rank of rear admiral. At the time of her death, she was a senior
consultant at Digital Equipment Corporation.
During her life Admiral Hopper received honorary degrees from more than 40 colleges and
universities. She was honored by her peers on several occasions, including the first Computer
Sciences "Man of the Year" award given by the Data Processing Management Association, and the
"Contributions to Computer Science Education Award" given by the Special Interest Group for
Computer Science Education of the ACM.
Admiral Hopper loved young people and enjoyed giving talks on college and university campuses.
She often handed out colored wires, which she called nanoseconds: they were cut to the length
that light travels in a nanosecond (about one foot). Her advice to the young was, "You manage
things, you lead people. We went overboard on management and forgot about leadership."
When asked of which of her many accomplishments was she the most proud, she answered, "All
the young people I have trained over the years." |