Grace Murray Hopper
"Amazing Grace" Hopper was born December 9, 1906 to Walter and Mary Murray in New York City. Hopper was the eldest of three children. As a child, Hopper loved gadgets. She loved to take things apart. Once when she was seven years old, she decided to find out how her alarm clock worked. She took one alarm clock apart and couldn't put it back together so she took apart another one to see how it is assembled. She ended up taking apart seven alarm clocks from around her house.
While Hopper was in high school, her father, Walter Fletcher, had hardening of the arteries and both his legs were amputated. Her mother, Mary Campbell Van Horne Murray, was a housewife. Her mother had a love for math which was obviously passed down. Although her father survived to be seventy five, her mother feared being a widow and took on the responsibilities of the finances of the family. She forced herself to become financially literate.
Hopper's parents believed that their daughters should have the same educational opportunities as their son. Her father encouraged her not to follow the traditional roles of women. In high school, she played basketball, field hockey and water polo. When working towards her Ph.D., she was one of four women in a doctoral program of ten students.
She entered Vassar College at the age of seventeen. She graduated Phi Beta Kappa with a BA in Mathematics and Physics. In 1931 she joined the faculty at Vassar where her starting salary was $800. While teaching, Hopper continued her studies in Mathematics at Yale University where she earned an MA in 1930 and a Ph.D. in 1934. She continued teaching at Vassar until 1943 when she joined the United States Naval Reserve.
She was commissioned a Lieutenant (JG) and was ordered to the Bureau of Ordnance Computation Project at Harvard University. She became the first programmer on the Navy's Mark I computer. Hopper loved this 8 foot high, 8 foot wide gadget filled with relays, switches and vacuum tubes. In 1946, when Hopper was released from active duty, she joined the Harvard Faculty at the Computation Laboratory where she continued her work on the Mark II and Mark III. She traced an error in the Mark II to a moth trapped in a relay, coining the term 'bug'. This bug was carefully removed and taped to the log book. In 1946 she joined the Eckert-Machly Computer Corporation (later called Sperry Rand), where she helped design the first commercial electronic computer called the UNIVAC. The UNIVAC operated a thousand times faster than the Mark I.
The computer industry changed drastically after she sponsored the development of COBOL (common-business-oriented-language). COBOL was the first language that allowed a programmer to speak to the computer with words rather than numbers. Hopper often joked "It really came about because I couldn't balance my checkbook."
Admiral Hopper was famous for presenting a nanosecond. She would have a piece of wire, about a foot long, and explain that it represented a nanosecond, since it was the maximum distance electricity could travel in wire in one billionth of a second. She often would also show a coil of wire, nearly one thousand feet long, which represented a microsecond to encourage programmers not to waste even a microsecond. Admiral Hopper was also famous for a remark she made on television in 1983. She said, "It is much easier to apologize that to get permission".
Admiral Hopper received many awards and honors for her accomplishments. She was promoted to Captain in 1973, Commodore in 1983 and Rear Admiral in 1985. (The first woman promoted to admiral was Staff Officer Alene B. Duerk, chief of the Navy nurse corps, who was made a Rear Admiral in 1972.) She was the first woman to be awarded a Ph.D. in Mathematics from Yale University. In addition to having buildings named after her, the Navy has named an Aegis Destroyer after Hopper- The Amazing Grace.
In 1986, at eighty, Grace Hopper retired from the Navy, the oldest serving officer at that time. A ceremony in her honor was held in Boston on the USS
Constitution. At the ceremony, Hopper was awarded the highest award given by the Department of Defense - the Defense Distinguished Service Medal.
Shortly after her retirement, Hopper became a Senior Consultant to Digital Equipment Corporation where she remained until about 18 months before her death. She did many of the same things as she did when she was in the Navy -- travelling on lecture tours around the country, speaking at engineering forums, colleges, universities passing on the message that managers shouldn't be afraid of change. Her favorite group to address was young people around the ages of 17 and 20. She believed they were fearless and that they question more than older people. She would often lecture to be innovative, open minded and give people the freedom to try new things.
Hopper dreamed of living to the age of 94. She wanted to be here December 31, 1999 to end the entire century in which she had lived through. Grace Hopper died in her sleep on New Year's Day, not in the year in which she wished but in 1992, eight years short of the new century. She was laid to rest with full military honors in Arlington National Cemetery.
http://ei.cs.vt.edu/~history/Hopper.Danis.htmlhttp://www.arlingtoncemetery.net/ghopper.htmSee also:
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