If you are reading this right now, you can thank… Dr. Grace Hopper Grace was a visionary mathematician who, in 1934, earned her PhD at Yale and taught at Vassar. When WWII began she joined the Navy Reserves as part of the WAVES (Women Accepted for Voluntary Emergency Service) program. She was assigned to the Bureau of Ordnance Computation Project at Harvard University. Grace worked on various electromechanical computing machines including the Mark I, the Mark II and eventually joined a company to help develop the UNIVAC I. She was skilled beyond her years, credited for the popularization of the term “debugging” for fixing computer glitches. However, she modestly credits her own laziness for her most prominent success: the compiler, as she sought to make programming faster and easier so that she could return to mathematics. In 1953 Grace invented the first compiler, a program that translates instruction in English to the language of a target computer. When she first developed it, nobody believed that it would do what she claimed, stating that “computers could only do arithmetic”. After demonstrating its use, people realized that she had developed a way to make machines understand ordinary language instructions. Her pioneering work in computer science formed the skeleton that supports modern day computing. Every single program used today, every operating system, server and application, is possible only through her work. Despite her pioneering work in computer science, it was her service to her country that she was most proud. While in the Navy, she reached the rank of Rear Admiral and, because of her many accomplishments, is sometimes referred to as “Amazing Grace”. Thank you, Grace, for your quest to simplify an arduous process and for your part in making modern technology possible. (And for proving that indeed, women and computers DO get along.)
Posted on: Sun, 23 Mar 2014 00:57:56 +0000
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