Grace Hopper

Broad Band: The Untold Story of the Women Who Made the Internet

by Claire L. Evans  · 6 Mar 2018  · 371pp  · 93,570 words

computer programmers and operators were tasked with enormous, intractable problems. Their creative solutions often meant the difference between life and death. Chapter Two AMAZING GRACE Grace Hopper was thirty-six, tenure tracked, and married when Japan attacked Pearl Harbor. She taught mathematics; her husband, Vincent, literature. The couple spent their summers

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than her brother’s, she did. The day those bombs fell on Pearl Harbor, the path of completely respectable middle-class life had been at Grace Hopper’s feet, but she wouldn’t take one step further. Within a few years, everything forked: she separated from Vincent, she quit her job,

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, causing a two-day panic. During the war, the Computation Laboratory was isolated from the handful of other computing projects in the world, and Grace Hopper, handling the lab’s everyday computational needs, had neither the time nor the opportunity to see what the rest of the field was doing. But

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scientists built similar machines, each earning its own qualifier: stored-program, general-purpose, digital, binary. In these early days, every computer was an island. When Grace Hopper visited the University of Pennsylvania in 1945, she was shocked to discover just how different the ENIAC was from the Mark I and Mark II

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. The other half had their mathematics schooling supplemented by U.S. Army training. These women, known to history as the ENIAC Six, were the peers Grace Hopper never knew she had. Some would later become her colleagues; a few, eventually, her friends. They were Kathleen “Kay” McNulty, Betty Jean Jennings, Elizabeth “

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began to entertain other possibilities. Around this time, in 1941, the army sponsored an intensive, ten-week electrical engineering course at the University of Pennsylvania. Grace Hopper had taught a similar kind of course at Barnard before enlisting: it was tuition-free, geared toward practical applications in defense, and open to anyone

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women had reverse engineered it from the machine itself. Built by electrical engineers, the ENIAC came with nothing but block diagrams of circuits. Just as Grace Hopper had before them, they taught themselves what to do, becoming hardware adepts in the process. They started with the vacuum tubes and worked their

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. Since we knew both the application and the machine, we learned to diagnose troubles as well as, if not better than, the engineer. Unlike Grace Hopper, who managed a team of operators punching her handwritten code into the Mark I’s tape loops, the ENIAC Six moved around inside the great

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while men are drawn to the practical, hands-on nature of hardware. Some might posit as much from the Babbage-Lovelace partnership, Howard Aiken and Grace Hopper’s testy relationship a generation later, or from the gendered division of labor between male hardware engineers and female operators on the ENIAC. But in

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any war, especially such an ugly one, as an opportunity. But working on military calculations during World War II allowed Betty Jean Jennings, Betty Snyder, Grace Hopper, and their peers to do more with their lives than teach, marry, or be secretaries. It opened an entirely new technical field to women,

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peace threatened to take it all away. After the war, as military funding dried up and authority over computational projects transitioned back to civilian hands, Grace Hopper found herself at a crossroads. In a short time, she’d become an expert in a nascent field, but she’d made sacrifices. Although she

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Right across the street was a junkyard. On the other side of the building was the Mount Vernon Cemetery. If the computer didn’t run, Grace Hopper joked, they’d throw it out one window into the junkyard and jump out the other. The narrative of enterprising young technology innovators striking out

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were their former colleagues at the Moore School—Betty Snyder, Betty Jean Jennings, and Kathleen “Kay” McNulty, and the grand dame of code herself, Grace Hopper, who was looking for a path forward after losing her place at Harvard. Pres and John were smart enough to hire them all. For its

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the hopes of training fresh blood from elsewhere in the ranks. “That’s how so many secretaries got to be programmers before we were through,” Grace Hopper recalled. That was the company ethos. “A gal who was a good secretary was bound to become a programmer, meticulous, careful about getting things

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stuck for at least four hours. Otherwise, it was a waste of her time. Betty was EMCC’s secret weapon, and by the time Grace Hopper arrived in Philadelphia, Betty had already been with the company for two years, working one-on-one with John Mauchly, at his living room table

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files and automatically generated routines for sorting and merging that data, keeping track of all the input and output in the UNIVAC’s tape units. Grace Hopper was floored by Betty’s Sort-Merge Generator. According to Grace, it marked the first time a computer was ever used to write a

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position demanding experience he does not have,” he banged out in a memo, “would fail to seek all possible help to discharge his duties.” Grace Hopper and her programming team were forced to pick up the slack. By 1950, they were pulling multiple shifts: selling and marketing the UNIVAC where Remington

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their hardware exhaustively and fail constantly. This created a certain sense of earned privilege. John Backus, a computer scientist at IBM and a contemporary of Grace Hopper’s, famously characterized programmers in the 1950s as a priesthood, “guarding skills and mysteries far too complex for ordinary mortals.” As much as the wizards

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most users’ experience that the computer scientist and writer Douglas Hofstadter has compared examining machine code to “looking at a DNA molecule atom by atom.” Grace Hopper finished the first compiler, A-0, in the winter of 1951, during the peak of her personnel crisis at Remington Rand. The following May,

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wouldn’t seem particularly friendly to a modern programmer, but this shorthand was the first step toward programming languages nonexperts could use. That would be Grace Hopper’s legacy. Getting the ball rolling on automatic programming was a big accomplishment, but it created an entirely new set of problems. Designing compilers and

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: Could a single language be understood by every computer on Earth? The earliest meeting to discuss this question was initiated by Mary Hawes—one of Grace Hopper’s former colleagues, with whom she’d codeveloped FLOW-MATIC at Remington Rand—when she “buttonholed” a well-known computer scientist, Dr. Saul Gorn,

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would be independent of any specific machine. Three committees were formed: short-range, intermediate-range, and long-range. The first would examine existing compilers, like Grace Hopper’s FLOW-MATIC, FORTRAN, and the AIMACO language developed by the air force, to decide what worked and what didn’t. After that analysis, they

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programmers actually had to come out of retirement to squash this final and hairiest moth in the machine. It goes to show the effectiveness of Grace Hopper’s efforts. The software industry, desperately needing a standard, leaped on COBOL. But even though it was a language built to save the future

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COBOL’s creators wrote this off as a “snob reaction.” Jean Sammet, one of the chairs of the CODASYL committee and a great admirer of Grace Hopper, pointed out that “usefulness and elegance are not necessarily the same thing.” She remembered the monumental nature of the task: COBOL represents an attempt by

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languages. COBOL was designed by committee, but it was technological armistice, a ceasefire for the good of the art. In Jean Sammet’s estimation, Grace Hopper did “as much as any other single person to sell many of these concepts from an administrative and management, as well as technical, point of

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their own importance, particularly in relation to hardware engineers. A compiler, Nora Moser noted, was like a “pseudocomputer,” a machine made from code alone, and Grace Hopper observed that it constituted a “second-level” of operation beyond the workings of the machine itself, reproducible and lightweight enough to be sent in the

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and the incentive to make programming easier for experts and novices alike,” they were in a unique position to effect real change, and did. Grace Hopper wasn’t the first woman to believe in programming, automatic or otherwise. Many of Grace’s female peers worked tirelessly to develop and standardize programming

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beehive, she’s surrounded by faceless men in identical suits, who look down at her as she smiles brightly, a miniskirt among the mainframes. Grace Hopper, by then in her early sixties, was back in active navy service, heading a programming languages group in the navy’s Office of Information Systems

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course we like having the girls around,’ he declares, ‘they’re prettier than the rest of us.’” Something happened to the generation of programmers after Grace Hopper and her peers. Although the Cosmo article suggests that women were being encouraged to pursue programming as an alternative to secretarial work, the field was

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and to anticipate the needs of nontechnical users. Despite its reputation as a discipline for introverted perfectionists, social skills are valuable in programming—even essential. Grace Hopper understood this, and it’s her early self-education in a wide range of nontechnical fields that made her such a profoundly competent programmer. As

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a top-of-the-line slice of MacBook Pro, will be obsolete by the time these words make it to ink. The machine code that Grace Hopper dreamed would someday write itself is now the engine that powers the world. It has allowed me to find the women we’ll meet in

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seeing plenty of female students, but they would be the last generation of women to enter the field in substantial numbers. In the generation after Grace Hopper and her contemporaries, the professionalization of “software engineering” marked a sea change in the gender demographics of computing. By 1984, the number of women

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sights on a mainframe system, the kind tended by experts in the large installations that had evolved from the efforts of early business programmers like Grace Hopper or Betty Holberton. Pam made a list of institutions and companies she thought might have a surplus mainframe lying around. After an exhaustive series

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It remains a radical idea, and it wasn’t the first time that women brought such a strong concern for use to technology: pioneers like Grace Hopper and Betty Holberton, working to refine and systematize programming languages, made their craft accessible to a broader public, opening doors for even nonprogrammers to understand

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“There was a couch in there,” she explained, in an anteroom. “It was a law then—they had to have couches for women.” Much as Grace Hopper thrived under pressure in Howard Aiken’s Harvard lab during World War II, Jake pulled all-nighters with the best of them. “Sometimes I worked

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Both of these simple, forward-thinking utilities would eventually become part of the ARPANET, folding the role of the NIC into the network itself. Like Grace Hopper with her automatic programming, Jake replaced herself with a machine. As the ARPANET Directory—the Internet’s yellow pages—grew alongside the network, Jake made

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of triumph and survival we can from our forebears, and I hope this book has unearthed a few: Ada Lovelace’s refusal of propriety, Grace Hopper’s forward-thinking tenacity, and the support the women of Resource One gave one another. Jake Feinler’s clarity of vision in the chaos of

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“I just reveled in it”: Ibid., 26. “Where have you been?”: Ibid., 29. Everyone at Harvard called it the Mark I computer: Kurt W. Beyer, Grace Hopper and the Invention of the Information Age (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2009), 37. “That is a computing engine”: Hopper, interview by Merzbach, 1968, 29. The

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old schoolteacher”: Hopper, interview by Merzbach, 1968, 29. “And then he gave me a week”: Ibid. Years later, when Grace was an established figure: Beyer, Grace Hopper, 314. “It was fascinating,” she said, a “hotbed of ideas”: Hopper, interview by Merzbach, 1968, 31. “bawling out” the perpetrator: Aiken’s reputation was

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American History, Smithsonian Institution, 13, http://amhistory.si.edu/archives/AC0196.pdf. “ninety-nine percent of the time”: Ibid., 10. Back before the war: Williams, Grace Hopper, 13. “The tremendous contrast”: Hopper, interview by Merzbach, 1968, 4. draftswomen, assemblers, secretaries, and technicians: Thomas Haigh, Mark Priestly, and Crispin Rope, ENIAC in

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Lerman, Ruth Oldenziel, and Arwen P. Mohun (Baltimore, MD: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 2003), 295. CHAPTER THREE: THE SALAD DAYS He promptly remarried: Williams, Grace Hopper, 17. “My time was up”: Hopper, interview by Merzbach, 1969, 15. If the computer didn’t run: Ibid. But computers had a huge: Abbate, Recoding

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3. “We all accepted Pres”: Bartik, Pioneer Programmer, 138–40. A year into her employment: Ibid., 123. “That’s how so many secretaries”: Captain Grace Hopper, “Oral History of Captain Grace Hopper: Interviewed by Angeline Pantages,” December 1980, Computer History Museum, 27, www.computerhistory.org/collections/oralhistories. But only EMCC had working machines: Beyer

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, Grace Hopper, 171. “slipped into UNIVAC like duck soup”: Hopper, interview by Merzbach, 1969, 10. “if the programmer and the engineer”: Holberton, interview by Ross, 1983,

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An excerpt from that oral history: UNIVAC Conference, 1990. “There was no feeling”: Holberton, interview by Ross, 1983, 14. “We are at a loss”: Beyer, Grace Hopper, 217–18. “it sounded impressive enough to match”: Hopper, interview by Merzbach, 1968, 8. CHAPTER FOUR: TOWER OF BABEL Not coming from any existing art

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1979), 290. Ostensibly, a computer like the UNIVAC: Like many people in the 1950s, Grace uses “UNIVAC” to mean “computer.” “the novelty of inventing programs”: Grace Hopper, “The Education of a Computer,” ACM ’52, Proceedings of the 1952 ACM National Meeting, Pittsburgh, 243–49. “a well-grounded mathematical education”: Ibid. running print

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advertisements: Abbate, Recoding Gender, 86. “It was very stupid”: Hopper, interview with Pantages, 1980, 7. Grace saw the proliferation: The biblical metaphor was used by Grace Hopper and stuck. Even the cover of Jean Sammet’s canonical Programming Languages: History and Fundamentals, the first major analysis of the field, features a winding

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. Sammet would often take the night train to Philadelphia to run programs on UNIVAC computers before they were shipped, serving as a beta-tester in Grace Hopper’s programming division. She remained a great admirer of Grace throughout her career. Steve Lohr, Go To: The Story of the Math Majors, Bridge

The Innovators: How a Group of Inventors, Hackers, Geniuses and Geeks Created the Digital Revolution

by Walter Isaacson  · 6 Oct 2014  · 720pp  · 197,129 words

academic and industrial research. ENIAC is fully operational. 1947 Transistor invented at Bell Labs. 1950 Turing publishes article describing a test for artificial intelligence. 1952 Grace Hopper develops first computer compiler. Von Neumann completes modern computer at the Institute for Advanced Study. UNIVAC predicts Eisenhower election victory. 1954 1954 Turing commits suicide

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on any of these factors. An example is the invention of the Harvard/IBM Mark I, the first big electromechanical computer. One of its programmers, Grace Hopper, wrote a history that focused on its primary creator, Howard Aiken. IBM countered with a history that featured its teams of faceless engineers who contributed

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the computation of every succeeding number,” she wrote. She envisioned a library of commonly used subroutines, something that her intellectual heirs, including women such as Grace Hopper at Harvard and Kay McNulty and Jean Jennings at the University of Pennsylvania, would create a century later. In addition, because Babbage’s engine made

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like a thunderbolt, or a lightbulb popping out of the head of a lone individual in a basement or garret or garage. Howard Aiken and Grace Hopper (1906–92) with a part of Babbage’s Difference Engine at Harvard in 1946. Jean Jennings and Frances Bilas with ENIAC. Jean Jennings (1924–2011

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would require the next major step in the creation of the modern computer: figuring out how to store programs inside a machine’s electronic memory. GRACE HOPPER Starting with Charles Babbage, the men who invented computers focused primarily on the hardware. But the women who became involved during World War II saw

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could transform the machines in wondrous ways. The most colorful programming pioneer was a gutsy and spirited, yet also charming and collegial, naval officer named Grace Hopper, who ended up working for Howard Aiken at Harvard and then for Presper Eckert and John Mauchly. Born Grace Brewster Murray in 1906, she was

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, fluid flows, explosions, and weather patterns—into mathematical equations and then into ordinary English. This talent helped to make her a good programmer. By 1940 Grace Hopper was bored. She had no children, her marriage was unexciting, and teaching math was not as fulfilling as she had hoped. She took a partial

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was sent to the Naval Reserve Midshipmen’s School at Smith College in Massachusetts, and in June 1944 graduated first in her class as Lieutenant Grace Hopper. She assumed that she would be assigned to a cryptography and code group, but to her surprise she was ordered to report to Harvard University

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to the first working electronic computer, von Neumann wandered around gathering the elements and concepts that became part of stored-program computer architecture. At Harvard, Grace Hopper and her programming partner, Richard Bloch, set up a place for von Neumann to work in the conference room right next to the Mark I

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to her instead. They had five children, and she continued to help on software design for UNIVAC. Mauchly also hired the dean of them all, Grace Hopper. “He let people try things,” Hopper replied when asked why she let him talk her into joining the Eckert-Mauchly Computer Corporation. “He encouraged innovation

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. The program had to be written not in BASIC (Gates’s favorite language) but in COBOL, the more complex language that had been developed by Grace Hopper and others as a standard for businesses. Ric Weiland knew COBOL and wrote a program editor for the ISI system, which Allen quickly mastered. At

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. The computer lab was named after Howard Aiken, who had invented the Mark I and operated it during World War II with the help of Grace Hopper. It housed Gates’s favorite machine: a PDP-10 from DEC, which had been destined for military use in Vietnam but was reassigned to assist

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’ a Computer Wonder,” Harvard Gazette, Apr. 9, 1998. 19. I. Bernard Cohen, Howard Aiken: Portrait of a Computer Pioneer (MIT, 1999), 9. 20. Kurt Beyer, Grace Hopper and the Invention of the Information Age (MIT, 2009), 75. 21. Cohen, Howard Aiken, 115. 22. Cohen, Howard Aiken, 98 and passim. 23. Beyer

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, Grace Hopper, 80. 24. Ceruzzi, Reckoners, 65. 25. Horst Zuse (son), The Life and Work of Konrad Zuse, http://www.horst-zuse.homepage.t-online.de/Konrad_

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.AlanTuring.net/intelligent_machinery. 2. In addition to the sources cited below, this section draws from Kurt Beyer, Grace Hopper and the Invention of the Information Age (MIT, 2009), and the following trove of Grace Hopper oral histories: Smithsonian (five sessions), July 1968, Nov. 1968, Jan. 7, 1969, Feb. 4, 1969, July 5, 1972

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; the Computer History Museum, Dec. 1980; Grace Hopper interview, Sept. 1982, Women in Federal Government oral history project, Radcliffe Institute, Harvard. 3. Kurt Beyer mistakenly calls her the first to get a math

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were ten before Hopper. See Judy Green and Jeanne LaDuke, Pioneering Women in American Mathematics: The pre-1940 PhDs (American Mathematical Society, 2009), 53; Beyer, Grace Hopper, 25 and 26. 4. Hopper oral history, Smithsonian, July 5, 1972. 5. Hopper oral history, Smithsonian, July 1968; Rosario Rausa, “In Profile, Grace Murray Hopper

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Smithsonian, July 5, 1972. 7. The Staff of the Harvard Computation Library [Grace Hopper and Howard Aiken], A Manual of Operation for the Automatic Sequence Controlled Calculator (Harvard, 1946). 8. Grace Hopper oral history, Computer History Museum. 9. Beyer, Grace Hopper, 130. 10. Beyer, Grace Hopper, 135. 11. Richard Bloch oral history, Charles Babbage Institute, University of Minnesota

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. 12. Beyer, Grace Hopper, 53. 13. Grace Hopper and Richard Bloch panel discussion comments, Aug. 30, 1967, in Henry S

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. Tropp, “The 20th Anniversary Meeting of the Association for Computing Machinery,” IEEE Annals, July 1987. 14. Beyer, Grace Hopper, 5. 15. Hopper oral history, Smithsonian, July 5, 1972. 16. Howard Aiken oral history, conducted by Henry Tropp and I. Bernard Cohen, Smithsonian Institution, Feb

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. 1973. 17. Grace Hopper and John Mauchly, “Influence of Programming Techniques on the Design of Computers,” Proceedings of the IRE, Oct. 1953. 18. Harvard computer log, Sept. 9, 1947

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, http://www.history.navy.mil/photos/images/h96000/h96566k.jpg. 19. Grace Hopper oral history, Smithsonian, Nov. 1968. 20. The Moore School Lectures, Charles Babbage Institute, reprint (MIT Press, 1985). 21. Hopper oral history, Smithsonian, Nov. 1968. 22

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, Smithsonian, Jan. 7, 1969. 48. Bloch oral history, Feb. 22, 1984, Charles Babbage Institute. 49. Robert Slater, Portraits in Silicon (MIT Press, 1987), 88; Beyer, Grace Hopper and the Invention of the Information Age, 9. 50. Goldstine, The Computer from Pascal to von Neumann, 3634. 51. Goldstine, The Computer from Pascal to

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von Neumann, 3840. 52. Goldstine, The Computer from Pascal to von Neumann, 199; Goldstine to Gillon, Sept. 2, 1944; Beyer, Grace Hopper and the Invention of the Information Age, 120. See also John Mauchly, “Amending the ENIAC Story,” letter to the editor of Datamation, Oct. 1979; Arthur

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that Stevenson would win. This is not true; polls had predicted an Eisenhower win. 78. Hopper oral history, Computer History Museum, Dec. 1980. 79. Beyer, Grace Hopper, 277. 80. Von Neumann to Stanley Frankel, Oct. 29, 1946; Joel Shurkin, Engines of the Mind (Washington Square Press, 1984), 204; Dyson, Turing’s Cathedral

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value of the factorial of a number. 10. The display and explanations of the Mark I at Harvard’s science center made no mention of Grace Hopper nor pictured any women until 2014, when the display was revised to highlight her role and that of the programmers. 11. Von Neumann was successful

AIQ: How People and Machines Are Smarter Together

by Nick Polson and James Scott  · 14 May 2018  · 301pp  · 85,126 words

third-grader to understand English grammar, or a machine to understand Python? To answer these questions, we’d like to tell you the story of Grace Hopper. She was nicknamed “Amazing Grace,” and not just because she’s the only person in this book to have appeared on the David Letterman show

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story of Watson, Alexa, chatbots, Google Translate, and all the other linguistic marvels of the digital world—really all begins with Amazing Grace. Grace Hopper, Queen of Software Grace Hopper was born in New York City in 1906. As a young girl she learned quickly that her family held two values in especially high

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do the same 168 years later, though she stood up to fight alongside the British, rather than against them.5 In the fall of 1924, Grace Hopper shipped off to Vassar College, determined to prepare for the world of work. That very year, Vassar introduced three new courses to its catalog: “Motherhood

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she continued teaching at Vassar for the next decade. Hopper in the War: The Harvard Mark I The outbreak of World War II would change Grace Hopper’s life forever. In 1942, with the memory of Pearl Harbor—and her great-grandfather—fresh in her mind, she tried to enlist in the

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. Instead they used octal (base 8), which led to mind-bending arithmetic like 7 + 1 = 10 or 5 × 5 = 31.† This drove programmers nuts, and Grace Hopper was no exception. Once, after spending weeks programming in octal on a computer called the BINAC, Hopper realized that she couldn’t get her checkbook

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that, the Programming Language Revolution had begun. From the mid-1950s onward, virtually everyone who talked to a computer did so using the model that Grace Hopper pioneered. Machine languages remained important, but they became the province of a few highly trained specialists. Everyone else used high-level programming languages whose instruction

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request out loud to a computer? To set things up, let’s summarize the top-down, rules-based model for human-machine linguistic interaction that Grace Hopper pioneered in the 1950s. • People tell machines what to do using a programming language, with a heavily restricted grammar and a small vocabulary of English

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called Harpy, created by researchers at Carnegie Mellon. Harpy recognized exactly 1,011 words, about as many as a small toddler. It was built on Grace Hopper principles: a restricted grammar and vocabulary for humans, and a fiendishly complicated set of rules for the machine, to transcribe speech into text. Harpy’s

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. The system quietly shut down in 2010, presumably because Google had all the data it needed. Of course, there’s been an awful lot of Grace Hopper–style coding since 2007 to turn all that data into good prediction rules. So more than a decade later, what’s the result? Let’s

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the dirt off a floor or filter spam from your inbox; we have vacuums and algorithms for that. Why should typing be any different? Postscript Grace Hopper may have been the first person to talk to a computer in English, but she certainly didn’t stop there. After her pioneering work on

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1992, but her legacy lives on. Over the years she’s had many things named after her, including a navy ship, a Cray supercomputer, and Grace Hopper College, at Yale University. She was posthumously honored with a Google Doodle in December of 2013, and with a Presidential Medal of Freedom in November

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. No doubt her great-grandfather the admiral would have been proud. Through her efforts to bring people and machines a bit closer together through language, Grace Hopper played an enormous role in inventing the modern world. 5 THE GENIUS AT THE ROYAL MINT Real-time monitoring, from sports to policing to financial

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C++ or Java) and an “interpreter” (for a language like Python). We use the term “compiler” to encompass both concepts here.   4.  Kathleen Broome Williams, Grace Hopper: Admiral of the Cyber Sea (Annapolis, Md.: Naval Institute Press, 2004), 1.   5.  Ibid., 2.   6.  Ibid., 11.   7.  Ibid., 18–20.   8.  Ibid., 22

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.   9.  Ibid., 26. 10.  Ibid., 29. 11.  Ibid., 27–28. 12.  Ibid., 82. 13.  Kurt W. Beyer, Grace Hopper and the Invention of the Information Age (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 2009), 53. 14.  Douglas Hofstadter, Gödel, Escher, Bach: An Eternal Golden Braid (New York

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: Vintage, 1980), 290. 15.  Williams, Grace Hopper, 70. 16.  Ibid., 80. 17.  Ibid., 85. 18.  Ibid., 86. 19.  Ibid. 20.  See ibid., 87. Original reference in Richard L. Wexelblat, ed., History of

Showstopper!: The Breakneck Race to Create Windows NT and the Next Generation at Microsoft

by G. Pascal Zachary  · 1 Apr 2014  · 384pp  · 109,125 words

code. By the early 1950s women had made a substantial contribution to the field. The pioneer in making it easier to program was a woman, Grace Hopper. But Hopper was sui generis; she was a role model who in a few short years became an anachronism. By the 1960s, programming was a

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. Why not a bulletin board for women programmers—not only the ones in NT but elsewhere in the company? She would call it Hoppers, after Grace Hopper, her heroine. Other women warmed to the notion. Ellen Aycock, one of Microsoft’s first female programmers, was among the newcomers to NT. She quickly

Computer: A History of the Information Machine

by Martin Campbell-Kelly and Nathan Ensmenger  · 29 Jul 2013  · 528pp  · 146,459 words

of the Programmers Who Created the Software Revolution (2001). Grace Murray Hopper’s role in promoting programming languages is well described in Kurt Beyer’s Grace Hopper and the Invention of the Information Age (2009). To try to bring some order to the history of the software field, a conference was organized

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the World Wide Web by Its Inventor. London: Orion Business Books. Bernstein, Jeremy. 1981. The Analytical Engine. New York: Random House. Beyer, Kurt W. 2009. Grace Hopper and the Invention of the Information Age. Cambridge MA: MIT Press. Bliven, Bruce, Jr. 1954. The Wonderful Writing Machine. New York: Random House. Bosman, Julie

Empire of the Sum: The Rise and Reign of the Pocket Calculator

by Keith Houston  · 22 Aug 2023  · 405pp  · 105,395 words

may even have simulated America’s first atomic bomb.54 Among the naval personnel who ran the ASCC during this time was a lieutenant named Grace Hopper, who showed both an affinity for working with the machine and a sympathy for its human wranglers. It was Hopper who collated and edited the

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-mark-i-d. Image courtesy of Collection of Historical Scientific Instruments, Harvard University. There is a striking comparison to be drawn between Howard Aiken and Grace Hopper on the one hand and Charles Babbage and Ada Lovelace on the other. One of Aiken’s many inspirations, Babbage was the irascible nineteenth-century

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down a persistent failure to a single relay—relay #70 in Panel F, it turned out—which had been incapacitated by an errant moth.72 Grace Hopper taped the insect into her logbook and recorded it as “First actual case of bug being found.”73 The concept of a computer “bug,” already

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rather than the factory.74 The future of the calculator would lie in other hands. * The incident is recounted in a 1969 interview conducted with Grace Hopper. The engineer’s name is redacted from the interview transcript. 8 The Sumlock ANITA The same year that Katherine Johnson double-checked John Glenn’s

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were forced to endure.29 Even so, when an ailing tube eventually broke it could be relied upon to break in a helpful way. As Grace Hopper, Howard Aiken, and other computing pioneers had discovered, a faulty relay was worse than a broken one: a half-dead insect might free itself from

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,” Norman Bel Geddes Database (Harry Ransom Center), accessed June 16, 2021, https://norman.hrc.utexas.edu/nbgpublic/details.cfm?id=476. 52 Merzbach, “Interview with Grace Hopper,” 7–8. 53 Lee, “Howard Aiken.” 54 Ceruzzi, Reckoners, 66. 55 J.A.N. Lee, “Grace Brewster Murray Hopper,” Computer Pioneers (Institute of Electrical and

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, Reckoners, 97–98. 69 Aspray, Computing Before Computers, 219–220. 70 Ceruzzi, Reckoners, 97–98. 71 Aspray, Computing Before Computers, 220. 72 Merzbach, “Interview with Grace Hopper,” 13. 73 “September 9: First Instance of Actual Computer Bug Being Found,” This Day in History (Mountain View, CA: Computer History Museum), accessed June 21

Invisible Women

by Caroline Criado Perez  · 12 Mar 2019  · 480pp  · 119,407 words

in 1967 Cosmopolitan magazine published ‘The Computer Girls’, an article encouraging women into programming.59 ‘It’s just like planning a dinner,’ explained computing pioneer Grace Hopper. ‘You have to plan ahead and schedule everything so that it’s ready when you need it. Programming requires patience and the ability to handle

Wired for War: The Robotics Revolution and Conflict in the 21st Century

by P. W. Singer  · 1 Jan 2010  · 797pp  · 227,399 words

, though, continued to take off, with the military at the center of their funding and development. Among the early pioneers in this period was “Amazing” Grace Hopper. Hopper was a U.S. naval officer who worked on the development of the Harvard Mark I computer made by IBM. The Mark I, which

The Computer Boys Take Over: Computers, Programmers, and the Politics of Technical Expertise

by Nathan L. Ensmenger  · 31 Jul 2010  · 429pp  · 114,726 words

well for careers as programmers, and indeed, those who did pursue professional careers in computing often became programmers and thrived at it. A few women, Grace Hopper and Betty Holberton of UNIVAC as well as Ida Rhodes and Gertrude Blanche of the National Bureau of Standards in particular, continued to serve as

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currently “overrun with males,” making it easy to find desirable dating prospects. Programming was “just like planning a dinner,” the article quoted software pioneer Admiral Grace Hopper as saying. “Women are ‘naturals’ at computer programming.” And in true Cosmopolitan fashion, the article was also accompanied by a quiz: in this case, a

…

called up predefined subroutines and displayed the result. Nevertheless, the Short Order Code represented a considerable improvement over the standard binary instruction set. In 1951 Grace Hopper, another UNIVAC employee, wrote the first automatic program compiler. Although Hopper, like many other programmers, had benefited from the development of a subroutine library, she

…

There were three existing compiler systems that the committee was particularly interested in considering: FLOW-MATIC, which had been developed for Remington Rand UNIVAC by Grace Hopper (as an outgrowth of her A-series algebraic and B-series business compilers), and which was actually in use by customers at the time; AIMACO

…

remarkable persistence of the forty-year-old software crisis. Where Did All the Women Go? In 1969 the Data Processing Management Association presented Rear Admiral Grace Hopper with its very first “man of the year” award. That a professional society in a technical field would, in this period, even consider awarding its

…

. As we have seen, women played an early and important role in the history of computing. Some of them became quite influential: in addition to Grace Hopper, Betty Snyder Holberton, Jean Sammet, and Beatrice Helen Worsley, among others, rose to positions of considerable prominence in the early computing industry.45 In fact

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,000 women working as computer programmers in the United States, and that there was an immediate demand for 20,000 more.50 The author quotes Grace Hopper herself as saying that programming was “just like planning a dinner”: “You have to plan ahead and schedule everything so it’s ready when you

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about the socIal Identities of the maJor ac- tors and the qualities of the technology is slowly dimInIshed. 2. The word "compiler" was chosen by Grace Hopper from Remington Rand when she created the A-O compIler In 1951 for the UNIVAC. Martin Campbell-Kelly and WIlham Aspray reported that she "chose

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