When Grace Murray Hopper joined the war effort in 1943 by signing up for the U.S. Navy, it would set the emerging field of computing on a new course.
Hopper was initially rejected by the Navy for being overage, 36, and underweight for her 5-foot-6-inch frame at 105 pounds.
Yet she wouldn’t accept no.
Hopper took a leave of absence from her job as a professor at Vassar College and told Navy officials that she was lean, tough and smart.
They let her in.
Hopper (1906-92) entered the Naval Reserve Midshipmen’s School at Smith College in Northampton, Mass., a training ground for junior officers, then was commissioned a lieutenant junior grade. She was armed to the teeth, with a BA degree in mathematics and physics from Vassar and a doctorate in math from Yale.
With those skills, she joined the Bureau of Ordnance Computation at Harvard under the direction of Howard Aiken.
Hopper pushed the limits of conventional thinking, finding innovative ways to solve problems — and she was just getting started.
During her long career in computing, Hopper emerged as a pioneer developer of several computer programming languages that ushered in the age of business computing. This included playing a key role in the 1959 invention of Cobol, a software program that let computers respond to written words rather than numbers — a mainstay of computing for decades.
“Hopper was a very dynamic and hard-charging woman who played a pivotal role in the development of the computer industry,” Kurt Beyer, who lectures on entrepreneurship at the University of California, Berkeley, told IBD.
Beyer, who wrote “Grace Hopper and the Invention of the Information Age,” added: “She was critical in the shift in thinking around the emphasis on software rather than hardware.”
Hopper was the third programmer to join Aiken, who was the principal engineer for IBM‘s (IBM) Harvard Mark I — a 51-foot-long, 5-ton computer that calculated the trajectory of naval guns.
Hopper developed math formulas and translated them into the binary computer code of ones and zeros for the Mark I.
Writing programs for the monster computer was tedious, and Hopper searched for a better way.
Hopper left active duty in 1946, though she remained in the Naval Reserve, and plugged away as a Harvard researcher in engineering science and applied physics. In her sites were the Mark II and III.
She pondered how a wider audience for computers could emerge if they weren’t so complicated to program. Hopper got to pursue that vision in 1949 when she joined computer maker Eckert-Mauchly in Philadelphia. It had built the Universal Automatic Computer, or Univac I, the first commercial U.S. electronic computer.
The company was founded by John Eckert and John Mauchly, two of the brightest minds of the early computing era.
The firm was acquired by Remington Rand in 1950 and merged into Sperry Corp. in 1955.
In the late 1940s, computers were designed for a specific task. They weren’t used for a variety of jobs, like today.
Hopper had a wider vision for the machines. She believed that computers could spread out in the business world with languages that did not require programmers to be math or tech specialists.
“It really was Hopper who pushed the notion that you could change the purpose of the hardware through the programming,” said Beyer.
As Hopper worked on the Univac, she recognized that codes and commands that were constantly retyped could be shared, stored on magnetic tape and reused, thus saving time and reducing errors.
She collected codes frequently used in programs and assigned a call number for each routine — with the computer instructed to retrieve the codes when needed.
In 1952, Hopper finished the first compiler. It let programmers use math symbols and other shortcuts instead of binary coding of ones and zeros. She called it the A-O Compiler, which influences the development of software programming to this day.
When Hopper presented her A-O Compiler to company executives, they were skeptical it would work.
“Nobody believed that I had a running compiler, and nobody would touch it,” Hopper said at the time. “They told me computers could only do arithmetic.”
Not About To Back Down
She developed more advanced compilers, which she called Flow-Matic and Math-Matic. Some of the code could be written with English commands, which the compiler translated into codes a computer could understand. It spurred the development of programs for common business tasks like accounting, billing and payroll processing.
“It was the first high-end programming language,” said Beyer. “It was a critical leap that allowed computers to proliferate at an astonishing rate.”
The computing crowd was all in, seeing compilers as the way to go.
Later in 1952, industry, university and government officials pushed for Cobol, which stands for common business-oriented language.
At the fore was Hopper. Her Flow-Matic compiler formed a basis for the new language, helping Cobol become the first widely used programming language for those business applications.
Born Grace Murray in New York City, she was the first of three children by Walter, a life insurance executive, and Mary, who had a love for math, puzzles and games. Grace picked them up fast.
The girl had an insatiable curiosity and enjoyed taking things apart to see how they worked. Such was the case with an alarm clock that she dissembled when she was 7.
Hopper graduated from Vassar in Poughkeepsie, N.Y., in 1928 and joined the faculty. Two years later at age 23 she married New York University professor Vincent Hopper, though they would divorce in 1945 with no children.
Meanwhile, she continued her studies and received her math Ph.D. from Yale in 1934.
Decades later, as she ignited the computer age, Hopper spoke out about such progress: “Humans are allergic to change. They love to say, ‘We’ve always done it this way.’ I try to fight that.”
She retired from the Naval Reserve in 1966 but was called back to active duty a year later for what was to be a six-month assignment on Cobol development. A half-year later, the Navy told her it needed her indefinitely.
By 1985, Hopper was a rear admiral. She finally retired permanently the next year. At age 80, she had been the oldest U.S. military officer on active duty and the highest ranking female in the Navy.
She then joined Digital Equipment Corp., an influential computer manufacturer, as a senior consultant, where she was active until the only thing that could slow her down happened.
Hopper died in Alexandria, Va., at age 85 and was buried in Arlington National Cemetery.
Howard Bromberg, who worked with Hopper in developing Cobol, wrote that she was a “mathematician, computer scientist, social scientist, corporate politician, marketing whiz, systems designer and programmer” — always a “visionary.”