Education:
Hartridge School, 1924
Vassar College, Bachelor of Arts in Mathematics and Physics, Phi Beta Kappa, 1928
Yale University, Masters of Arts in Mathematics, 1930
Yale University, Ph.D., Sigma Xi, 1934
Vassar Faculty Fellow, 1941-42
Military Record:
Apprentice Seaman and Midshipman, May 4- June 27, 1944
Lieutenant ( junior grade), June 27, 1944
Lieutenant, June 1, 1946
Lieutenant Commander, April 1, 1952
Commander, July 1, 1957
Retired with rank of Commander, December 31,1966
Recalled to active duty, August 1, 1967
Captain, August 1, 1973
Commodore, November 8, 1983
Rank of Commodore known as Rear Admiral, November 8, 1985
Retired with rank of Commodore, August 14, 1986
Professional Activities
Instructor to Associate Professor, Department of Mathematics, Vassar College, 1931-43
Assistant Professor of Mathematics, Barnard College, 1943
Mathematical Officer, US Navy, Bureau of Ordinance, 1944-46
Research Fellow in Engineering Sciences and Applied Physics, Computational Laboratory, Harvard University, 1946 - 49
Senior Mathematician, Eckert-Mauchley Computer Corporation, 1949-1952
Systems Engineer, Director of Automatic Programming Development, UNIVAC Division of the Sperry Corporation, 1952 - 64
Visiting Lecturer to Adjunct Professor, Moore School of Electrical Engineering, University of Pennsylvania, 1959
Staff Scientist, Systems Programming, UNIVAC Division of Sperry Corporation, 1964 - 71
Active duty, United States Navy, serving in the Information Systems Division as OP-911F 1967 - 77
Professional Lecturer in Management Sciences, George Washington University, 1971-78
Active duty, United States Navy, serving as NAVDAC-OOH, 1977-86
Senior Consultant, Digital Equipment Corporation 1986 -
Honors and Awards:
Phi Beta Kappa, 1928
Sigma Xi, 1934
Naval Ordinance Development Award, 1946
Fellow, American Association for the Advancement of Science, 1962
Society of Women Engineers, SWE Achievement Award, 1964
Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers, Philadelphia Section Achievement Award, 1968
Connelly Memorial Award, Miami Valley Computing Association, 1968
Data Processing Management Association, Computer Science "Man-of-the-Yaer" Award, 1969
Upsilon Pi Epsilon, Honorary Member, Texas A&M, Alpha Chapter, 1970
American Mothers Committee, Science Achievement Award, 1970
American Federation of Information Processing Societies, Harry Goode Memorial Award, 1970
Honorary Doctor of Engineering, Newark College of Engineering, Newark, New Jersey, 1972
Wilbur Lucas Cross Medal, Yale University, New Haven, Connecticut, 1972
Fellow, Association of Computer Programmers and Analysts, 1972
Epsilon Delta Pi, Honorary Member, SUNY Potsdam Chapter, Potsdam, New York, 1973
Honorary Doctor of Science, C. W. Post College of Long Island University, Greenvale, New York, 1973
Elected to membership in the National Academy of Engineering, 1973
Legion of Merit, 1973
Distinguished Fellow of the British Computer Society, 1973
Honorary Doctor of Laws, University of Pennsylvania, Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, 1947
Distinguished Member Award, Washington, DC. Chapter, Association for Computing Machinery, 1976
Honorary Doctor of Science, Pratt Institute, 1976
W. Wallace McDowell Award, Institute of Electrical and Electronic Engineers Computer Society, 1976
Honorary Doctor of Science, Linkoping University, Sweden, 1980
Honorary Doctor of Science, Bucknell University, Lewisburg, Pennsylvania, 1980
Honorary Doctor of Science, Acadia University, Wolfvill, Nova Scotia, 1980
Navy Meritorious Service Medal, 1980,
Honorary Doctor of Science, University of Chicago, Illinois, 1981
Honorary Doctor of Science, Southern Illinois University, Carbondale, Illinois, 1981
Honorary Doctor of Public Service, George Washington University, Washington, DC., 1981
Honorary Doctor of Humane Letter, Seton Hill College, Greensburg, Pennsylvania, 1982
Honorary Doctor of Science, Marquette University, Milwaukee, Wisconsin, 1982
Dedication of the Grace Murray Hopper Center for Computer Learning, Brewster Academy, Wolfeboro, New Hampshire, 1983
Honorary Doctor of Business Administration, Lake Forest College, Lake Forest, Illinois, 1983
Honorary Doctor of Science, Clarkson University, Potsdam, New York, 1983
Institute of Electrical and Electronic Engineers Computer Pioneer Medal, 1983
Honorary Doctor of Science, Hood College, Fredric, Maryland, 1983
Honorary Doctor of Science, Russell Sage College, Troy, New York, 1983
Golden Plate Award, American Academy of Achievement, Coronado, California, 1983
Honorary Doctor of Science, Villa Julia College, Baltimore, Maryland, 1983
American Association of University Women Achievement Award, 1983
Federally Employed Women Achievement Award, 1983
Association of Computing Machinery Distinguished Service Award, 1983
Living Legacy Award, Women's International Center, San Diego, California
Women of the Year Award, Young Women's Christian Association of the National Capitol Area, 1984
Honorary Doctor of Science, University of Maryland, college Park, Maryland, 1984
Honorary Doctor of Laws, Smith College, Northampton, Massachusetts, 1984
Honorary Doctor of Science, St. Peter's College, Jersey City, New Jersey, 1984
Honorary Doctor of Science, Worcester State College, Worcester, Massachusetts, 1984
Honorary Doctor of Science, Hartwic College, Oneonta, New York, 1984
Honorary Doctor of Business Administration, Providence College, Providence, Rhode Island, 1984
Honorary Doctor of Science, City College of Morris, Morristown, New Jersey, 1984
Honorary Doctor of Science, Bloomsburg College, Blooms burg, Pennsylvania, 1984
Honorary Doctor of Science Aurora College, Aurora, Ohio, 1985
Honorary Doctor of Science, Wright State University, Dayton, Ohio, 1985
Honorary Doctor of Letters, Western New England College, Springfield, Massachusetts, 1985
Honorary Doctor of Laws, College of William and Mary, Williamsburg, Virginia, 1985
Honorary Doctor of Science, Rivier College, Nashua, New Hampshire, 1985
Honorary Doctor of Science, Marist College, Poughkeepsie, New York, 1985
Honorary Doctor of Science, Saint John Fisher College, Rochester, New York, 1985
Honorary Doctor of Science, Syracuse University, Syracuse, New York, 1986
Honorary Doctor of Humane Letters, Caldwell College, Caldwell, New Jersey, 1986
Honorary Doctor of Science, University of Massachusetts at Amherst, Amherst, Massachusetts, 1986
Honorary Doctor of Military Science, Northeastern University, Boston , Massachusetts, 1986
Honorary Doctor of Letters, Drexel University, Drexel, Pennsylvania, 1987
(by no means is this list exhaustive)
Favorite Maxim to young people:
A ship in port is safe, but that is not what ships are built for.
Grace Brewster Murray was born in New York City on December 9, 1906. She was the first child of Mary Campbell Van Horn Murray and Walter Fletcher Murray, and was named after her mother's best friend, Grace Brewster. When Grace was three, her sister Mary was born, followed by her brother Ro ger two years later.
While Grace was a child, her father developed severe hardening of the arteries. At that time there was no treatment, so both of his legs were amputated. After a long period of hospitalization, he returned to his job as an insurance broker, propelling himself using two wooden legs assisted by two canes. Grace's father used to tell his children that if he could walk with two wooden legs and two canes, they could do anything. Inspired her father's words, Grace sought to do well in school, excelling in mathematics. Her favorite class was geometry, because "When I did geometry problems, I could use all the colored pencils."
Grace's father, in addition to being an inspiration for Grace, encouraged her to abandon the usual feminine roles of that period. He had seen many of his friend's daughters unemployed in the Panic of 1893 due to a lack of training. As a result, Grace's father wanted to ensure that his daugh ters would be able to hold a job if necessary. So he encouraged both of his daughters to go to college, and wanted them to work for at least one year after graduating. As things turned out, Grace ended up supporting herself through almost her entire adult life.
Grace attended Vassar college, where she graduated with a Bachelor of Arts in math and physics in 1928. In addition, she won a Vassar College Fellowship that allowed her to continue her schooling. As a result, she obtained a Masters degree in mathematics at Yale in 1930.
On the evening of June 15, 1930, Grace married Vincent Foster Hopper, an English professor at New York University. After their honeymoon in Europe, Grace was offered a position teaching mathematics for $800 a year at Vassar. Because this was during the great depression, when jobs for the e ven the educated were scare, Grace jumped at the chance. She remained a faculty member at Vassar from 1931 to 1943, during which time she rose from instructor to associate professor and attained a Ph.D. in mathematics from Yale. In her doctoral thesis entitled "A new Criterion for Reducibility of Algebraic Equations," she proved things geometrically, which she said "upset everybody, but I always liked geometry better."
When World War II broke out in 1941, Grace made a decision that would change her life forever -- to join the United States Navy. It was not surprising that Grace reacted to the beginning of WW II by deciding to join the Navy because her family had a history of serving their country. One o f her ancestors was a Minute Man, and her maternal great-grandfather had been a rear admiral in the Navy. "I was about three years old when I met him," she recalled. "Although long retired, he was tall and straight, carried a black cane with silver top on it, and he had white muttonchop whiskers, w hich I had never seen before. He was a very impressive gentleman!"
Enlisting, however, was not as easy as it sounded. The United States government has classified mathematics as a field crucial to the war effort, and felt that mathematicians could best serve the war effort as civilians. As a result, Grace had to get special permission in order to enlist, a nd was sworn into the Naval Reserve in December 1943.
After enlistment, Grace underwent training in Midshipman's School for Women in Northampton, Massachusetts. While in school, Grace was under a great deal of pressure. The other students at midshipman's school were the age of the students she had been teaching at Vassar, and if she did not gr aduate, she would be out of the Navy. Despite the pressure, Grace pulled thought with flying colors, graduating first in her class.
After graduation, Grace was assigned to the Bureau of Ordinance Computation at Harvard University. Upon arriving at Harvard, Commander Howard Aiken, introduced her to the Mark I simply by waving his hand at it and saying "That's a computing engine."
Grace fell in love with the computer at first sight. Although she did not tell Howard Aiken, during her entire first day of work, she kept thinking, "Gee, that's the prettiest gadget I ever saw." The Mark I was to remain her favorite computer, to the extent that she occasonally visited it in the Smithsonian after it was dismantled.
After being introduced to the machine, Grace received her first assignment from Aiken. He told her that he "would be delighted to have the coefficients for the interpolation of the arc tangents by next Thursday."
Thankfully, Grace received help from two young officers, Robert V. D. Campbell and Richard M. Bloch, who helped her get her first program on the computer. This accomplishment made her the third person to program the world's first large-scale automatically sequenced digital computer.
At the time Grace was programming the Mark I, it was being used to calculate the angles at which the new Naval guns were to be aimed. These angles varied, depending on weather conditions, so thousands of calculations were needed. "There was a great rush on everything," recalled Grace. "All of a sudden we had self-propelled rockets, and we had to compute where they were going and what they would do." Because of the rush, Mark I was to have be run twenty-four hours a day. As a result, members of the team running the computer often slept on their desks, just in case the machine ran int o difficulties. One morning after Grace had spent the entire night with Mark I and its successor, Mark II, Aiken asked Grace what she had been doing all night. "Chaperoning these two damned computers," she snapped.
The process of creating the programs for the computer was not easy, either. "The coding sheets we used had three columns on the left [for code numbers] and we wrote comments on the right which didn't go into the computer." These values were then transferred to punch tape, which was fed in to the computer. The number of steps involved made it extremely easy to make errors. In Grace's words, "You write a 'B' and someone reads it as a '13'." Or "You write a delta and someone reads it as a '4'. And sometimes you make a mistake and write the wrong thing to begin with."
From time to time, Howard Aiken would come into the lab where the programmers were and would ask them "Are you making any numbers?" At first, they didn't have a suitable excuse, but on a warm summer's day in 1945 they came up with one so plausible that it is still used today.
The team was in the process of building Mark II, in a temporary building with no air-conditioning. It was a hot summer, so all the windows were open in a futile attempt to get some relief from the heat. Suddenly, for no apparent reason, the machine stopped. Looking inside the machine, th ey found that a moth had flown into a relay, which had beaten it to death; As a result, the relay failed. The moth was carefully removed with a pair of tweezers and taped to a page in the logbook. "From then on if we weren't making any numbers, we told him that [Aiken] we were debugging the comp uter," recounted Grace.
At about this time, Grace and her colleagues began keeping a notebook containing segments of code that they knew worked. Each subroutine was written in a generic manner so that whenever a programmer needed to perform a certain function that they knew the code had already been written for, they could simply copy it out of the book, into their program.
After the war, most of the WAVES returned to civilian life, marrying and having children. Grace, who was divorced and had no children, wanted to stay in the Navy. However, the Navy's maximum allowable age was thirty-eight, and she had turned forty. Grace said "That was the first time I w as told I was too old ... I always explain to everybody that it's better to be told you're too old when you're forty because then you go through the experience and it doesn't bother you again."
Although she was offered a position teaching at Vassar, she declined, choosing to stay on at the Harvard Computational Laboratory, remaining a member of the Naval Reserves.
Grace left Harvard in 1949 and joined the Eckert-Mauchley Computer Corporation in Philadelphia as a senior mathematician. This was a risky move because the common opinion of the time was that there was not enough market for big computers to start a company. In Grace's words, "Back in those days, everybody was using punched cards, and they thought they'd use punched cards forever." Grace, however, had always dared to take risks, and boldly joined the new company, just as the new Binary Automatic Computer was begin completed.
BINAC, as the new machine was called, was programmed in C-10. This code, according to Grace, "has been the basis for most codes since. A was add, M was multiply, B was bring, C was clear; it was a beautiful code. That instruction has been the foundation of every instruction code since."
Event thought the coding was much easier, everything was not rosy. " Those were precarious days," Grace recalled. "We used to say that if UNIVAC I didn't work, we were going to throw it out one side of the factory, which was a junkyard, and we were going to jump out the other side, which w as a cemetery!"
Programming the BINAC was done using octal. As a result, Grace taught herself to add, subtract, multiply and divide in octal with great efficiency. The only problem resulting from Grace's proficiency was that her checkbook was out of balance at the end of the month. It remained unbalanced for three months, until her brother, a banker, discovered that she had occasionally subtracted in octal instead of decimal.
Grace's experience working with computers and writing programs led her to believe that the computer could be made to write its own programs. She also knew that the key to opening the field of computers up to non-scientific persons was to make programming languages that non mathematical peo ple could understand.
In the meantime, Remington Rand bought the Eckert-Mauchley Corporation in 1950, which was in turn was later merged into the Sperry corporation. Grace remained with the company through all its changes until she retired from Sperry in 1971.
In 1952, Grace completed her first compiler for Sperry, known as the A-0. The A-0 System was a set of instructions that could translate symbolic mathematical code into machine language. In producing A-0, she took all the subroutines she had been collecting over the years and put them on ta pe. Each routine was given a call number, so that it the machine could find it on the tape. "All I had to do was to write down a set of call numbers, let the computer find them on the tape, bring them over and do the additions. This was the first compiler," as described by Grace. After the A-0 s ystem, Grace and her staff produced versions A-1 and A-2, improvements over the older version. The A-2 compiler was the first compiler to be used extensively, paving the way to the development of programming languages.
Shortly after Grace completed the first compiler, she gave a talk on how it worked. She was met with the common opinion that a computer couldn't write its own programs. It took two years for the compiler to become accepted. "I had a running compiler," said Grace," and nobody would touch i t because, they carefully told me, computers could only do arithmetic; they could not do programs. It was a selling job to get people to try it. I think with any new idea, because people are allergic to change, you have to get out and sell the idea."
Grace also originated the idea that computer programs could be written in English. She viewed letters as simply another kind of symbol that the computer could recognize and convert into machine code. Although dissuaded by the establishment, she followed her philosophy of " go ahead and do it. You can apologize later," and developed the B-0 compiler. This compiler came later to be known as FLOW-MATIC. FLOW-MATIC was aimed at business applications, such as calculating payroll and automatic billing. By the end of 1956, Hopper had UNIVAC I & II understanding twenty English-like st atements using FLOW-MATIC
Further funding was needed to continue the project, however, and a demonstration to present to the management at Sperry was devised. A short program was written, one small enough to fit into memory with the compiler. The program seemed so small, and they were asking for quite a sum of mon ey, so they decided to try to impress the management by having the computer understand a German and French version of the program as well. This, however, turned out to be a disaster. "It was absolutely obvious," said Grace," that a respectable American computer, built in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania , could not possibly understand French or German! And it took us four months to say no, no, no, no! We wouldn't think of programming in anything but English," before they would get any funding. Even after she had written over 500 programs, she was sill told that computers did not understand Engl ish.
By 1957, there were three major computer languages in use: APT, FORTRAN, and FLOW-MATIC. But more and more languages were being developed, each one only operating on only one platform. By the early 1960's, it was realized that a universal language was needed, that would operate on any comp uter. And so the language COBOL was born. Although Hopper was not involved in the development of COBOL directly, much of FLOW-MATIC went into its creation.
In 1966, Hopper was once again told by the Navy that she was too old to remain in the reserves, and was asked to resign. On December 31, 1966, the Navy placed Hopper on the Naval Reserve retired list. "It was the saddest day of my life," said Hopper.
The Navy, however, found they couldn't get along without her. Its payroll plan had been rewritten 823 times and still would not work, so they decided that had had enough. So seven months after Grace's retirement, Norman J. Ream, then special assistant to the secretary of the Navy, called her back to duty to standardize the high-level languages the Navy was using and get the entire Navy to use them. "Mr. Ream," replied Hopper, "the first job is finite, the second job is infinite. But I will be glad to try."
Initially, Hopper was asked to return to active duty for only six months, but it was not long before her orders were changed to "indefinite." Under her direction, the Navy produced a COBOL certifier that was available to everyone. Translators were also developed to translate non-standard varieties of COBOL into the standard one.
In addition to being a computer pioneer, Grace was a born teacher, communicating on whatever level necessary to get her point across. Whenever she gave a speech while she was still in the Naval Reserves, Grace usually wore her uniform and her cap as "identifier." She would then point out t o her audience that every record in a computer must have an identifier for the computer to be able to store data in it and retrieve it later.
Another one of her favorite teaching tools was her wire "nanosecond." One day, Grace herself was having a hard time comprehending what a nanosecond was, so she called down to the engineering building and asked them to "Please cut of a nanosecond and send it up to me." She received a piece of wire 11.78 inches long, which represented the maximum distance electricity could travel in a wire during one nanosecond. Grace liked her nanosecond so much, that she asked for something to compare it to. They then sent her a "microsecond" -- a coil of wire 984 feet long. She said, "Some times I think that we should hang one on all programmers' desks or around their necks so they know exactly what they're wasting when they throw away a microsecond."
Picoseconds, according to Grace, can be found in small paper packets at fast-food restaurants. Although the packets are labeled "pepper," they contain black specks one picosecond long
Throughout her career, Grace received numerous awards. So plentiful were her accolades that this article would be too long if they were all listed.
In November 1985, Congress conferred special recognition, raising Grace Hopper to the rant of rear admiral, making her the first woman to ever hold that rank. On August 14, 1986, at the age of seventy-nine, Admiral Hopper's retirement ceremony was conducted on "Old Ironsides." Hopper died New Year's Day 1992,a and was laid to rest with full military honors on January 7, 1992.
Bibliography:
Billings, Charlene W. Grace Hopper : Navy Admiral and Computer Pioneer. Hillside : Enlsow, 1989.
Lee, J. A. N. "Unforgettable Grace Hopper." Reader's Digest. October, 1994 : 181-185.
Slater, Robert. Portraits in Silicon. Cambridge : The MIT Press, 1987.
WexelBlat, Richard L., ed. History of Programming Languages. New York : Academic Press, 1981.