In today’s male-dominated computer programming industry, it is easy to forget that a woman, Grace Hopper, helped usher in the computer revolution, and is hailed as the inventor of computer programming. Although men are credited with the invention of computers, back then they primarily focused on hardware; it was women who saw early on the importance of programming.
Admiral Grace Hopper was the one who realized the need for a universal coding language that was simple enough for ordinary people to use for coding, and it was her who relentlessly pushed for, and eventually created, such a language. From being the brains behind COBOL, the first common coding language, to putting an end to World War II, Grace Hopper contributed so much to the world in her lifetime than can possibly be written in an article. The following words are simply a mere segment of her life work.
Born in New York City, in 1906, to a prosperous family, Grace was supposed to grow up as an ordinary upper class lady of her time. Instead, her early curiosity meant she preferred dismantling alarm clocks to find out how they work instead of playing with dolls; a habit which her mother did not discourage.
With this encouragement, she went on to study math and physics at Vassar and then Yale, earning her PhD in Mathematics in 1931, becoming one of the very first women to achieve such a degree. After graduating, Grace stayed at Vassar to teach math for the next ten years.
In 1941, Japan attacked the shores of Pearl Harbor and pulled America into war. Patriotic women were volunteering all over the country to serve in Women Accepted for Volunteer Emergency Service (WAVES); Grace was not one to be left out. She filed for a leave of absence and after an initial struggle due to her age—
37 years old—and “slight build” as deemed by her army recruiter, she persevered and persuaded him to accept her into the navy as a junior grade lieutenant.
She was then assigned to the Bureau of Ordinance Computation Project at Harvard University; to her surprise and delight, she became part of the programming staff for the Mark I computer—the first large-scale automatic calculator and a precursor of electronic computers, weighing over 4500 kg.
As World War II was a war of science, the Navy had requisitioned Mark I to undergo fast and accurate wartime scientific calculations, such as missile targeting trajectories and the range of mine sweeping detectors. Hopper’s assignment was to create a way to talk to Mark I—to translate complex differential equations into commands that the computer could execute.
Though Hopper knew nothing about programming at the start, she learned quickly and soon began using Mark I to solve critical war problems. The most important problem that her team solved during this period was an impossibly complicated partial differential problem that could not be solved using traditional methods.
It took three months to solve it, but Hopper and her team did the impossible and figured out how to make a sphere collapse upon itself and how to assemble the force point locations for its collapse. Hopper found out after the War that the sphere problem she solved was in fact the implosion problem for the nuclear bomb. This was the same bomb that was then dropped on Japan, and six days later the War ended.
After the War, Hopper accepted a position with Eckert-Mauchly Computer Corporation and helped develop the UNIVAC computer, a name that became synonymous with “computer”.
Admiral Hopper believed that the major obstacle to computers in non-scientific and business applications was the shortage of programmers for these far from user-friendly new machines. The key to opening up new worlds to computing, she knew, was the development and refinement of programming languages.
With perseverance and dedication, she finally created the first revolutionary compiler in 1952; a program that translates human readable language into computer executable machine language. Two years later, she was named Director for automatic programming, and it was her department that released the first programming languages, which were compiler based; these included ARITH-MATIC, FLOW-MATIC, and MATH-MATIC.
In 1959, the Conference on Data Systems Languages (CODASYL) brought together different computer experts for a 2-day conference. Hopper had been the committee’s technical consultant; along with her previous employees, helped define the Common Business-Oriented Language (COBOL), which is still one of the most famous business languages.
Later, Hopper invested a great deal of time advocating validation procedures to bring about the international standardization of computer languages. She remained working well past her 80s, continuously contributing to the field of computers, and as a navy publicist and lecturer all her life. She passed away in 1992, certainly as the longest serving computer enthusiast of her day.
References
iq.intel.com
cs.yale.edu
news.harvard.edu
britannica.com