Late Great Engineers: Grace Hopper – English speaking

A few years after her death, in 1994 the Reader’s Digest printed a pithy quotation attributed to Grace Hopper, revealing that she’d always been “more interested in the future than the past.” It’s a neat little phrase that probably most computer pioneers of the 20^th century will have uttered at some point. But it’s unlikely that any other than Hopper will have reminded themselves of the notion by having a clock on the wall running anti-clockwise. It may seem counter-intuitive to keep an eye on time running backwards when all you care about is the future, but Hopper’s reasoning was that it prompted her to remember that “humans are allergic to change. They love to say: ‘we’ve always done it this way.’ I try to fight that.” The brilliant, sharp-tongued and unconventional US Navy rear admiral who’d helped develop the first commercial electronic computer was, as former SVP at Apple Computer Jay Elliot once observed, ‘all Navy’ – “but when you reach inside, you find a pirate dying to be released.”

Although Hopper’s technical achievements may sound to the 21^st century ear to be modest milestones on the road to the digital world we live in today, these moments on the timeline are cardinal. Her work on the UNIVAC stored-program commercial data-processing computer ushered in the age of operators sitting at keyboard consoles, inputting data on the fastest business machine of the day. She also worked on the Harvard Mark I proto-computer, the first large-scale automatic calculator and a precursor of electronic computers. In writing the 561-page manual for the Mark I – A Manual of Operation for the Automatic Sequence Controlled Calculator – Hopper became the author of the first book of instructions on how to operate a computer. She devised naval applications for COBOL (Common Business-Oriented Language) and, while working for the Eckert-Mauchly Computer Corporation in the late 1940s, she designed arguably the first ‘compiler’ (a term Hopper coined), for translating programming instructions into code. As Hopper’s entry in Encyclopaedia Britannica explains: “Her development of compilers for COBOL and her strong advocacy of the language led to its widespread use in the 1960s.”

Early life

Grace Brewster Murray was born in New York on 9 December 1906 into a conventional church-going Dutch protestant family with naval associations going back to her great-grandfather, who had been at the Battle of Mobile Bay in the American Civil War. The eldest of three children, according to Mary Bellis’s article Grace Murray Hopper: The Younger Years, as a child she “liked to tinker with gadgets and find out how they worked. At age seven she was curious about how her alarm clocked worked.” The story goes that while she was adept at taking them apart, her facility in reassembling them had yet to develop. After destroying the seventh household clock, her mother understandably limited Grace to working on just one.

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Although Grace loved the subject, according to Bellis, “it wasn’t proper at that time for a young lady to take an interest in math”. Nevertheless, her father encouraged her into education so that she could experience the same opportunities as boys and become self-sufficient. Grace duly attended private schools in New York, “where the curriculum focused on teaching girls to be ladies.” She wanted to attend Vassar College, but was initially rejected because her test scores in Latin were too low. But she could not be held back for long: by the time she was 25, with a Ph.D. from Yale under her belt – dissertation entitled New Types of Irreducibility Criteria – she was teaching mathematics at Vassar. By 1941 she was associate professor and married to New York University professor Vincent Hopper.

World War II

A flourishing career in academia was interrupted by the Second World War and, spurred on by the attack on the US naval base at Pearl Harbor, Hopper attempted to join the war effort. Deemed unsuitable for active service due to her age (she was too old), her size (she was too small) and the importance of her profession, Hopper signed up to the U.S. Naval Reserve (Women’s Reserve) in December 1943, where she was assigned to the Bureau of Ships Computation Project at Harvard University. According to Yale News, this is where “she worked for Howard Aiken, another computer pioneer, who had developed the IBM Automatic Sequence Controlled Calculator, better known as the Mark I, one of the earliest electromechanical computer. ..Hopper was responsible for programming the Mark I and punching machine instructions onto tape.”

Hopper’s vocation was influenced by the close relationship between the US military and the early computer industry that had emerged from the Second World War and grew into the Cold War. At Harvard, Hopper and her colleagues worked on top-secret calculations essential to the war effort, computing rocket trajectories, creating range tables for new anti-aircraft guns and calibrating minesweepers. Hopper also completed calculations for the army and ‘ran numbers’ for one of the 20^th century’s greatest mathematicians John von Neumann in the development of the ‘Fat Man’ plutonium bomb dropped on Nagasaki.

Post-war

After the war Hopper declined a full professorship at Vassar, preferring to remain at Harvard, where she became a research fellow in engineering sciences and applied physics. This was where she worked on the development of the Mark II and Mark III computers, as well as leaving a permanent impression on the English language. While working on the Mark II one evening in 1945, Hopper discovered a problem. She took the machine apart and discovered that the fly in the ointment was in fact a large moth. While engineers have routinely used the word to describe mechanical malfunctions since the 19^th century, Hopper was the first to refer to a ‘computer bug’ and to speak of ‘debugging’ a computer.

When it became clear that she would receive neither a full commission in the Navy nor tenure at Harvard, Hopper resigned from both and entered the private sector as senior mathematician at Eckert-Mauchly Computer (later Remington Rand) in Philadelphia that had developed ENIAC (Electronic Numerical Integrator and Computer) in 1945 for the United States Army. This was where Hopper recommended writing programming language in words rather than symbols, only to be told that computers couldn’t understand English. Hopper persisted in her view that “it’s much easier for most people to write an English statement than it is to use symbols. So I decided data processors ought to be able to write their programs in English, and the computers would translate them into machine code.”

Compiler breakthrough

While working for Remington Rand, Hopper completed the first version of her compiler: A-0. In 1954 she became director of automatic programming, her department responsible for some of the first compiler-based programming languages, including MATH-MATIC and FLOWMATIC, that by the late 1950s would extend into COBOL, the most ubiquitous business language to date. By the 1970s, she was working on implementing standards for these early programming languages. In an intense world of numbers and symbols she maintained her sharp sense of humour, often quoted as ironically stating that “the wonderful thing about standards is that there are so many of them to choose from.”

Back in the 1950s Hopper had been a founding member of the Society of Women Engineers, who were in 1964 to confer on her the organisation’s highest honour – the Achievement Award – in recognition of her “significant contributions to the burgeoning computer industry as an engineering manager and originator of automatic programming systems.” As if to emphasise her success in a male-dominated field and in male-dominated organisations, five years later the Data Processing Management Association named Hopper the first computer science Man of the Year. In 1991, on receiving what was then the National Medal of Technology from President George H W Bush, she remarked: “If you ask me what accomplishment I’m most proud of, the answer would be all the young people I’ve trained over the years; that’s more important than writing the first compiler.”

Grace Hopper died at the age of 85 in 1992, less than a decade short of her target of 2000 that she had pinpointed as the moment when computers would have reached such a stage that, according to Yale News, “she could laugh at the unbelievers.” But by this time, the world believed, and in 2016, President Barack Obama posthumously awarded Hopper the Presidential Medal of Freedom for her accomplishments in computer science.

“I’ve received many honours and I’m grateful for them,” Hopper often reflected. “But I’ve already received the highest… and that has been the privilege and honour of serving very proudly in the United States Navy.” She was buried at Arlington National Cemetery.