Hopper, Grace Murray 1906-1992

HOPPER, GRACE MURRAY 1906-1992

Computer engineer

Background

Grace Hopper graduated from Vassar College in 1928 and entered Yale University, where she earned a Ph.D. in mathematics and physics in 1934. She returned to Vassar to teach, but World War II changed her career path.

UNIVAC

In 1943 she joined the WAVES, (Women Accepted for Volunteer Emergency Service) as a lieutenant and was sent to the Bureau of Ordnance Computation Project, There she learned to program the Mark I, the world's first large digital computer. After the war she was a research fellow at Harvard for three years before she joined the Eckert-Mauchly Computer Corporation, which became a division of Remington Rand. By 1959 she was director of automatic program development for the UNIVAC division at Remington Rand, the first commercial computer. At Remington Rand, Hopper changed the computer forever.

Compiler

Prior to her work computers were programmed in machine language, a purely digital, very complex coding structure that required a precise knowledge of how computers actually performed the operations they were given. This language of mathematics bore no resemblance to English or any other spoken tongue. Hopper created a compiler for programmers that amounted to a translator and a shorthand system. The compiler provided the bridge between such simple commands as GOTO, which tells the machine to link one instruction with another, and the intricate set of purely electronic, machine-language commands that speak directly to parts of the computer. When a program is written, it uses English-lanugage (or any other language) terms and mathematical symbols and formulas, written according to precise rules of grammar. The compiler recognizes these and converts them into forms the computer can use.

COBOL

The earliest generally accepted computer programming language not in machine language was FORTRAN, which was used primarily by mathematicians. Hopper developed a programming language called COBOL that made business applications on computers practical. While trained programmers were required in order to talk to computers in COBOL, the language was simple, flexible, and practical enough to make it usable in various settings and to demonstrate the capacity of computers to perform difficult business-related functions. Hopper expanded the universe of computer users.