Grace Hopper was a pioneer in computing. She worked on the first commercial computer in history, paving the way for the future of modern computing.
“If you have a good idea, you should do it“: The story of Grace Hopper, programmer of the first commercial computer in history
Who was Grace Hopper
Mathematician, computer scientist, military officer, teacher and science communicator Grace Brewster Murray was born in New York City on 9 December 1906 to a middle-class family of Scottish and Dutch descent. The eldest of three children, she showed a strong curiosity about how things worked from an early age. It is said that at the age of seven she was caught dismantling several alarm clocks in order to understand their inner workings.
At the age of 17, she was admitted to the prestigious Vassar College, a women’s college that had rejected her the previous year because of her poor grades in Latin. She graduated in 1928 with a degree in mathematics. Two years later, she earned a master’s degree from Yale and married Vincent Foster Hopper, a professor of literature at New York University, whom she divorced in 1945 but kept his surname.
In 1931 she began teaching mathematics at Vassar College, where she became an associate professor in 1941. Meanwhile, she continued her studies, earning a doctorate in mathematics from Yale in 1934. She was one of only four women admitted to a class of 10, and one of the few women to achieve such an academic milestone at the time.
World War II and joining the navy
In 1941, after the bombing of Pearl Harbor, Grace Hopper decided to quit teaching and enlist in the Navy. Grace was initially rejected because of her age, at age 34, she was too old to enlist. She was also turned away because of her small size, but she persisted and eventually received a green flag to join the U.S. Naval Reserve as a volunteer with WAVES (Women Accepted for Volunteer Emergency Service). She ranked first in her training course in Massachusetts, was granted a temporary leave of absence from her teaching duties, and was given the rank of lieutenant in the Computation Project at Harvard University.
This would prove to be the “defining moment” in Grace’s life and career. Just one year later, in 1944, she joined a Harvard University group led by Howard H. Aiken working on the IBM Automatic Sequence Controlled Calculator (MARK I), the first electromechanical computer in the United States. The Mark I was a huge automatic calculating machine, weighing four and a half tonnes, 16 metres long, 2.4 metres high and made up of 750,000 mechanical parts.
Grace Hopper’s revolutionary insight and the first “bug”
In front of the Mark I, Grace Hopper reverted to the child she once was, curiously dismantling alarm clocks. Driven by a strong passion for linguistic accuracy, she was the ideal person to write the technical documentation for the machine, teaching it a multitude of operations using commands on punched tape. The work was so complex that she could write no more than five pages a day. The result was a groundbreaking text known as “The Computer Bible”, the first programming manual, published in 1946.
In 1947, while testing the new Mark II, the machine suddenly stopped working. A moth had found its way into one of the relays. The term “bug”, which had been used since the time of Thomas Edison to describe mechanical problems and malfunctions, was introduced into the emerging language of computing by this incident.
The new “universal” programming language
After the war, despite her significant research achievements, Grace Hopper decided to change her career and joined the Eckert-Mauchly Computer Corporation in Philadelphia, which was working on the first commercially produced computer on a large scale, the UNIVAC I. Here, her leadership experience proved crucial. Grace believed that it was necessary to develop a programming language based on natural language rather than mathematical notation, so that it could be used by anyone. She was a visionary, dreaming of a future where everyone could use a computer every day without needing to know mathematics or programming languages. “No one wanted to believe it… they said that computers could only do arithmetic“.
The new compiler was called Flow-Matic and included a set of English keywords. It was the forerunner of COBOL (Common Business-Oriented Language), which was developed in 1959 and is still in use today (e.g. in ATMs). Thanks to Grace Hopper’s advocacy, the development of major programming languages was greatly accelerated. Instead of creating different dialects for different hardware, languages had to be adapted and standardised to run on any computer. Hopper, originally hired to manage and teach a single, huge machine, worked tirelessly to find a language that could be used by all subsequent generations of computers.
The legacy of Grace Hopper
For her immense contributions, Grace Hopper is remembered today as “Amazing Grace”: a scientist, a computer pioneer, and an extraordinary communicator with an extraordinary ability to think outside the box. Her vision for the future of computing is not just a celebration of technology, but a call to manage computing resources with wisdom and responsibility.
Grace Hopper’s legacy continues to inspire new generations of programmers, scientists and leaders, reminding us of the importance of looking ahead, facing challenges with courage and never ceasing to innovate.
Throughout her career, she gave around 300 talks a year and encouraged everyone she met to share their ideas with her. “The most important thing I’ve done is not to build a compiler, but to mentor the younger generation. They come to me and say, ‘Do you think this is possible?’ And I say, ‘Try it. And then I follow their progress .”
Over the years she received 40 honorary degrees and the National Medal of Technology. In 1969, she was named Man of the Year by the Data Processing Management Association, despite being a woman. She was posthumously awarded the Presidential Medal of Freedom, the highest civilian honour in the United States, by Barack Obama in 2016. A guided missile destroyer and the Hopper Cray XE6 supercomputer have also been named in her honour. Documentaries such as The Queen of Code and Born with Curiosity have also celebrated her life and work.
Grace Hopper served until her death on 1 January 1992. Just ten years earlier, she had been promoted to the rank of Commodore.
