Assignment 5
Grace Murray Hopper was born
in New York, New York on December 9, 1906.
She was the oldest of three children and was an extremely curious child
from an early age on. At age seven, she
showed an uncanny interest in how things worked and was mesmerized by
gadgets. She disassembled seven alarm
clocks attempting to figure out how they worked. Her parents encouraged her curiosity and provided her with a firm
foundation for her inquisitiveness to grow.
Grace, just as her mother, loved math.
Her mother studied geometry and encouraged Grace to follow her passion
for math. Grace’s father was an
insurance broker and encouraged all of his children not only by his own
example, but through his speech as well. He wanted them to know that they could
accomplish anything if they put their minds to it. He inspired Grace to pursue higher education and to avoid being
limited to the typical feminine stereotypes.
Grace Murray graduated from
Vassar with a B.A. in mathematics in 1928.
Her hard work paid off when in 1928 at the age of 22 she was graduated
Phi Beta Kappa from Vasser College.
She worked under algebraist Oystein Ore at Yale for her M.A. in 1930.
She married an educator named Vincent Foster Hopper in 1930. Grace Hopper began teaching mathematics at
Vassar in 1931 where her first year’s salary was $800. She received her Ph.D. in 1934. By 1941 she had achieved the rank of
associate professor when she won a faculty fellowship for study at New York
University’s Courant Institute for Mathematics. She stayed there until she joined the United States Naval Reserve
in December of 1943.
Admiral Grace Murray Hopper
had come from a family with military traditions and it came as no surprise when
she resigned her Vassar post to join the Navy WAVES (Women Accepted for
Voluntary Emergency Service) in December 1943.
In July of 1944, she was commissioned as a lieutenant and reported to
the Bureau of Ordnance Computation Project at Harvard University where she was
the third person to join the research team of professor and Naval Reserve
Lieutenant, Howard H.
Aiken. Howard Aiken directed the work
which came down to creating the first programmable digital computer, the Mark
I. Their work helped to design a machine
to make fast, difficult calculations for tasks such as laying minefields. Grace had no background in computing so it
was very much a crash course in the frustrations and complexities of
programming and the beginning of her life’s work. Her love of gadgets caused her to immediately fall for the
biggest gadget she’d ever seen. The
Mark I was fifty-one feet long, 8 feet high and 8 feet wide and was encased
with glass. When the war ended she wanted to stay in the navy. At this time she was 40 and her age
prevented her transfer from the WAVES to the regular navy. Therefore, she remained in the reserves.
In 1949, she joined J.
Presper Eckert and John Mauchly, who had developed ENIAC, one of the earliest
computers. They had begun to work on a
new program called UNIVAC, which was a computer to record information on
high-speed magnetic tape. This produced
an interest by the Sperry Corporation and they bought the company. Grace stayed on at Sperry later becoming a
systems engineer and director of automatic programming from 1952 to 1964. She and her staff developed Flow-matic, the
first programming language to use English words which was later incorporated
into COBOL. COBOL was the business
programming language that brought computer use and date processing into the
world of commerce. Before that time,
computing had been seen as a tool of scientists and the leading computer
companies were competing to be the first to come up with such a business
language.
In 1966, Grace approached
retirement age and hesitantly retired from the navy. At her retirement, she held the rank of Commander. She returned to active duty the following
year and was exempted from the mandatory retirement age of 62. She was recalled to active duty for what was
supposed to be a six-month assignment at the request of Norman Ream, then
Special Assistant to the
Secretary of the Navy for
Automatic Data Processing. After her
six months were up, her orders were changed to say her services would be needed
indefinitely. In 1969 she was voted
“Man of the Year” by the Data Processing Management Association. In 1973,
Admiral Elmo Zumwalt, Jr., Chief of Naval Operations, promoted her to Captain.
For the next 20 years, she lectured, wrote and consulted. In 1986, the 80-year-old Grace Hopper
retired involuntarily from the Navy.
The ceremony was held in Boston on the USS Constitution, fulfilling her
final request before ending her Naval career.
In her retirement speech, she talked about moving forward toward the
future and stressed the importance of leadership. At her retirement, she was presented the highest award given by
the Department of Defense- the Defense Distinguished Service Medal- one of
innumerable awarded she received from both the Navy and industry. Even after
her retirement, she became a Senior Consultant to Digital Equipment Corporation
where she was active until approximately 18 months before her death.
One dream Grace Hopper had
was to live to the age of 94. She
wanted to be here December 31, 1999 for the New Year’s Eve to end all New
Year’s Eve parties. She wanted to be
able to look back at the early days of the computer and say to all those who
had doubted, “See? We told you the computer
could do all that!” She died in her
sleep on January 1, 1992. Rear Admiral
Grace Murray Hopper was laid to rest at Arlington National Cemetery, Virginia
with a full Navy funeral. She continued
to receive honors even after her death.
In 1994 she was inducted into National Women’s Hall of Fame and the Navy
announced that they would name a guided missile destroyer USS Hopper.
Sources Cited
1.
Grace
Murray Hopper,
http://www.agnesscott.edu/lriddle/women/hopper.htm
by Rebecca Norman, Class of 2000 (Agnes
Scott College)
2. Professional Activities & Significant Honors /Awards,
http://www.norfolk.navy.mil/chips/grace_hopper/file2a.htm
3. Admiral Grace Murray Hopper,
http://www.sdsc.edu/ScienceWomen/hopper.html
4. People And Discoveries:
Grace Murray Hopper,
http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/aso/databank/entries/btmurr.html
5.
Grace
Murray Hopper, http://www.netsrq.com/~dbois/hopper.html
by Danuta Bois
6.
Looking
Back: Grace Murray Hopper’s Younger
Years,
http://www.norfolk.navy.mil/chips/grace_hopper/young.htm
by Dickason Assistant Editor of Chips
7.
Remembering
Grace Murray Hopper: A legend in Her
Own Time,
http://www.norfolk.navy.mil/chips/grace_hopper/file2.htm
by Elizabeth Dickason