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Most of us remember seeing Admiral Grace Murray Hopper
on television. We recall a charming, tiny, white-haired
lady in a Navy uniform with a lot of braid, admonishing
a class of young Naval officers to remember their nanoseconds.
The "nanoseconds" she handed out were lengths
of wire, cut to not quite 12 inches in length, equal to
the distance traveled by an electron along the wire in the
space of a nanosecond--one billionth of a second. In teaching
efficient programming methods, Admiral Hopper wanted to
make sure her students would not waste nanoseconds. Occasionally,
to make the demonstration even more powerful, she would
bring to class an entire "microsecond"--a coil
of wire nearly 1,000 feet long that the admiral, herself
tough and wiry, would brandish with a sweeping gesture and
a steady wrist.
The vividness of our impression of Hopper as a great teacher
derives from these images. But, as computer pioneer Howard
Bromberg has written, Hopper was much more. She was a "mathematician,
computer scientist, social scientist, corporate politician,
marketing whiz, systems designer, and programmer,"
and, always, a "visionary." After graduating from
Vassar with a degree in mathematics in 1928, Grace Brewster
Murray worked under algebraist Oystein Ore at Yale for her
Ph.D. (1934). She married Vincent Foster Hopper, an educator,
in 1930, and began teaching mathematics at Vassar in 1931.
The Murrays were a family with a long
military tradition; Grace Hopper's ancestors had served
in the American Revolutionary War. Thus it surprised no
one when she resigned her Vassar post to join the Navy WAVES
(Women Accepted for Voluntary Emergency Service) in 1943.
Commissioned as a lieutenant, she reported in 1944 to the
Bureau of Ordnance Computation Project at Harvard University.
She was the third person to join the research team of Professor
(and Naval Reserve lieutenant) Howard H. Aiken, who had
requested her months earlier and greeted her with the words,
"Where the hell have you been?" Then he pointed
to the Mark I electromechanical computing machine: "There's
the machine. Compute the coefficients of the arc tangent
series by next Thursday."
Hopper plunged in and learned what the machine could do
with a clever mathematician at the helm. By the end of World
War II in 1945, she was working on the Mark II. Although
her marriage was dissolved at this point, and though she
had no children, she did not resume her maiden name. She
was appointed to the Harvard faculty as a research fellow,
and in 1949 she joined the newly formed Eckert-Mauchly Corporation,
founded by the builders of ENIAC, one of the first electronic
digital computers.
She never again held only one job at a time. She went back
and forth among institutions in the military, private industry,
business, and academe, and in all these places she was regarded
as one of the most incisive strategic "futurists"
in the world of computing. Hopper remained associated with
Eckert-Mauchly and its successors (Remington-Rand, Sperry-Rand,
and Univac) until her official "retirement" in
1971. Her best-known contribution to computing during this
period was the invention, in 1953, of the compiler, the
intermediate program that translates English language instructions
into the language of the target computer. She did this,
she said, because she was "lazy" and hoped that
"the programmer may return to being a mathematician."
Her work on compilers and on making machines understand
ordinary language instructions led ultimately to the development
of the business language COBOL. Hopper's work also foreshadowed
or embodied enormous numbers of developments that are still
the very bones of digital computing: subroutines, formula
translation, relative addressing, the linking loader, code
optimization, and symbolic manipulation. At her death, she
was an active consultant for Digital.
She was briefly retired from the Naval Reserve in 1966,
but was called to active duty the next year to take charge
of the Navy's standardization of COBOL and other languages.
In December 1983, she was promoted to the rank of commodore
in a White House ceremony. The rank was merged with that
of rear admiral two years later, so she became Admiral Hopper.
Throughout her life, it was her service to her country of
which she was most proud. She died on New Year's Day in
1992 and, appropriately, was buried with full Naval honors
at Arlington National Cemetery.
We are here to celebrate the achievements of women in computing
and to pledge ourselves to extend them. In computing more
than other disciplines, women in the right place at the
right time have made an enormous difference. If computing
has led the way in making space for women's participation
on an equal basis, it is because the discipline was pioneered
in large part by women like Grace Murray Hopper. What was
true for Hopper is all the more true for women today because
of her work.
- by Merry Maisel, San Diego Supercomputer
Center |
Meet
admiral Grace Hopper