Notable Women in History [Chapter 4] - previous post got deleted by mistake!
Mathematician, Computer Scientist, Navy Rear Admiral
As a child, Grace Hopper loved to take things apart. When she got to Vassar College, she majored in Mathematics and Physics, later earning her MA in 1930 and a PhD in Math from Yale University in 1934.
After the war she continued on at Havard, working on the Marks II and III, and eventually helped desing the UNIVAC, a much faster computer.
World WAr II prompted her to join the United States Naval Reserve, and Hopper was ordered to the Bureau of Ordnance Computation Project at Harvard University, where she began programming the Mark I computer.
After the war she continued on at Havard, working on the Marks II and III, and eventually helped desing the UNIVAC, a much faster computer.
On September 9, 1947, Harvard’s Mark II Aiken Relay computer was malfunctioning. After rooting through the massive machine to find the cause of the problem, Admiral Grace Hopper's team, who worked in the Navy’s engineering program at Harvard, found the bug. It was an actual insect.
It is believed that Hopper was the one to coin the term "bug" to describe the malfunctioning or an error in a computer program, however...
The first recorded use of the term 'bug', with regards to being an error or malfunction in a machine, comes from none other than Thomas Edison. In an 1878 letter to an associate (which was sold in an auction in 2018), he noted:-
“You were partly correct, I did find a ‘bug’ in my apparatus, but it was not in the telephone proper. It was of the genus ‘callbellum.’ The insect appears to find conditions for its existence in all call apparatus of telephones.”
Hopper quickly fell in love with computers and programming, she adamantly believed that computers should be user-friendly so that nonscientists could use them, she thought that programming languages should be as easy to understand as the English language:
"[...] hence, her work on the compiler, which transformed source code from high-level computer language that could be written by a human into a low-level language that a computer could process. But, back in the day, that view wasn’t exactly popular among her peers."
Her greatest contribution was the development of COBOL (COmmon Business Oriented Language), a programming language that used English words rather than numbers. Because of it, she received the first "Man of the Year" award from the Data Processing Management Association and the National Medal o Technology in 1969.
Before she retired from the navy in 1986, she was the oldest American on active duty.
Consulted sources:
Grace Hopper on Wiki
Grace Hopper's Bug
Debugging the origins of Bug
Hopper's Story
The Origin of The Term Computer Bug
Grace Hopper: Yale Computer Science
Image sources:
Grace Hopper's Portrait
Hopper in a computer room
Edison's Letter
Hopper at the UNIVAC I console
Thanks for reading!