Grace Hopper

Grace Brewster Murray was born on December 9, 1906, in New York City, the eldest of three children of Walter Fletcher Murray, an insurance broker, and Mary Campbell Van Horne Murray ^[1]. Her mother loved mathematics and her father insisted that his daughters receive the same education as his son, an unusual position for the era. Family stories describe a child who took apart alarm clocks to see how they worked, a curiosity her parents chose to encourage rather than punish ^[2].

She attended private schools in New York and New Jersey, then entered Vassar College, where she studied mathematics and physics. She graduated in 1928 with membership in Phi Beta Kappa and continued to Yale University, earning a master's degree in mathematics in 1930 ^[1]. That same year she married Vincent Foster Hopper, an educator who later taught at New York University. She kept his surname for the rest of her life.

In 1934 Yale awarded her a doctorate in mathematics, a rare achievement for a woman at that time; her dissertation, supervised by Øystein Ore, concerned the irreducibility of algebraic equations ^[2]. She had already joined the faculty at Vassar in 1931, and she taught mathematics there through the 1930s and early 1940s, rising to associate professor ^[3].

The attack on Pearl Harbor changed the direction of her career. Hopper tried to enlist in the Navy but was initially turned away: she was in her mid thirties, underweight by Navy standards, and her occupation as a mathematics professor was considered vital to the war effort ^[2]. She persisted, obtained a waiver, and joined the Navy Reserve through the WAVES program in 1943. She trained at the Naval Reserve Midshipmen's School at Smith College and was commissioned a lieutenant, junior grade, in 1944 ^[1].

The Navy assigned her to the Bureau of Ships Computation Project at Harvard University, where she reported to Commander Howard Aiken. There she became one of the first programmers of the Harvard Mark I, an electromechanical calculating machine more than fifty feet long that ran computations for the war effort ^[3]. Hopper learned the machine from its circuit diagrams, wrote programs for ballistics and other military problems, and produced a 500 page manual of operations for the Mark I, one of the earliest substantial documents about programming a computer ^[4].

She remained at Harvard after the war as a research fellow, working on the Mark II and Mark III machines. A famous incident from this period involved a moth found trapped in a relay of the Mark II in 1947; the operators taped the insect into the logbook with a note about the first actual case of a bug being found. Hopper told the story often, and the logbook page survives in the Smithsonian collections ^[4]. The terms bug and debugging predate the incident, but her retelling fixed it in computing folklore.

In 1949 Hopper left Harvard for the Eckert-Mauchly Computer Corporation in Philadelphia, the firm founded by the builders of ENIAC, where she joined the team developing UNIVAC I, the first commercial electronic computer produced in the United States ^[3]. The company was absorbed into Remington Rand and later Sperry Rand, and Hopper stayed with the corporate line for years.

Her central technical contribution came in 1952, when she completed the A-0 system, a program that translated symbolic mathematical code into machine instructions and is widely described as the first compiler ^[5]. The idea that a computer could help write its own programs met real resistance. Hopper later recalled that colleagues told her computers could only do arithmetic, and that it took time before anyone believed her working system did what she claimed ^[2].

She kept pushing the idea further. Her team produced FLOW-MATIC in the mid 1950s, the first programming language to use English-like statements for business data processing ^[5]. Hopper argued that programs written in words rather than symbols would open computing to people who were not mathematicians, a conviction that ran against much professional opinion at the time and proved correct.

In 1959 industry and government representatives met in the Conference on Data Systems Languages, known as CODASYL, to define a common business programming language. The committee drew heavily on FLOW-MATIC in designing COBOL, the Common Business-Oriented Language, released in 1960 ^[5]. Hopper served as a technical adviser to the effort, and although she did not write the language herself, her earlier work shaped it so directly that she is often called the grandmother of COBOL ^[3].

COBOL became the dominant language of business computing for decades, running payroll, banking, insurance, and government systems around the world. Hopper spent much of the 1960s promoting standardization, arguing that programs should run on machines from different manufacturers without rewriting, and she helped develop validation routines used to test COBOL compilers for conformance ^[6].

Her Navy career ran in parallel. She had remained in the reserves after the war and retired in 1966 with the rank of commander, only to be recalled to active duty within months because the Navy needed her help standardizing its COBOL usage ^[1]. What was planned as a six month recall stretched into nearly two more decades of service.

Hopper's marriage to Vincent Foster Hopper ended in divorce in 1945, and she never remarried and had no children ^[2]. She rarely discussed her private life in interviews, preferring to talk about machines, young programmers, and the future of computing.

Colleagues remembered her as blunt, funny, and relentless. She handed out lengths of wire about 11.8 inches long, the distance light travels in a nanosecond, to make audiences feel why computers and their programmers could not afford wasted time ^[4]. A sign version of her favorite maxim, that it is easier to ask forgiveness than to get permission, hung over her long career of pushing past institutional caution.

Teaching remained close to her identity. She had begun as a college instructor, and even at the height of her Navy duties she lectured constantly at universities, companies, and conferences, often addressing her remarks to the youngest people in the room. She said the reward she valued most was the training of young people ^[6].

Through the 1970s Hopper worked in the Navy's programming languages group, promoting standards and testing for the service's computers. Congress passed special legislation to keep her on active duty past normal retirement age, and she was promoted to captain in 1973 and to commodore in 1983; the rank was renamed rear admiral, lower half, in 1985 ^[1].

When she finally retired on August 14, 1986, in a ceremony aboard USS Constitution, she was 79 years old and among the oldest officers on active duty in the Navy ^[3]. Retirement did not mean rest. She joined Digital Equipment Corporation as a senior consultant and continued a heavy schedule of public speaking, appearing in her admiral's uniform and delighting audiences with nanosecond wires and stories from the earliest days of computing ^[6].

Honors accumulated in her final years. She had been named the first Computer Sciences Man of the Year by the Data Processing Management Association in 1969, and in 1991 President George H. W. Bush awarded her the National Medal of Technology, making her the first woman to receive it individually ^[7]. Grace Hopper died in her sleep on January 1, 1992, in Arlington County, Virginia, and was buried with full military honors at Arlington National Cemetery ^[1].

Few figures in computing are remembered as warmly or as widely. Anyone asking who was Grace Hopper encounters a double legacy: the technical one, in compilers and COBOL, and the human one, in her insistence that computing belonged to ordinary people using ordinary words. Programming languages that read like English, now taken for granted, trace back through COBOL and FLOW-MATIC to her stubborn advocacy in the 1950s ^[5].

The Navy named the guided missile destroyer USS Hopper for her in 1996, one of the few warships named for a woman, and the Cray XE6 supercomputer Hopper at the Department of Energy's NERSC facility also carried her name ^[3]. In 2016 President Barack Obama posthumously awarded her the Presidential Medal of Freedom, the highest civilian honor in the United States ^[7].

Her name reaches new generations through the Grace Hopper Celebration, an annual gathering of women in computing organized by AnitaB.org that draws tens of thousands of attendees ^[6]. Any Grace Hopper biography must reckon with a career built on being told no: too old for the Navy, too fanciful about compilers, too optimistic about plain language programming. Among the most striking Grace Hopper facts is how often the institutions that resisted her ideas later adopted them entirely, which is why Grace Hopper achievements are still taught wherever programming is learned.