Monday’s Google Doodle honors computing genius Grace Hopper on what would have been her 107th birthday, doodling her right where she spent much of her time – at the helm of one of the world’s first computers.
Dr. Hopper, remembered as a great pioneer in computing, as well as in women’s achievements in science and engineering, was born as Grace Brewster Murray on Dec. 9, 1906, in New York City. She married Vincent Foster Hopper in 1930 (he died in World War II, in 1945), and took his name.Hopper received her PhD in mathematics from Yale in 1934, as one of four woman in a doctoral class of 10, and later taught math at Vassar College, where she had taken her bachelor’s degree.
In 1943, during World War II, she left the college to join the war effort and enlist in the United States Naval Reserve’s Bureau of Ordnance Computation Project at Harvard University. There, she joined a team of programmers working on the Mark I, an electro-mechanical computer 51 feet long, eight feet high, and two feet wide. Its some 756,000 parts weighed more than 10,000 pounds.
At Harvard, Hopper would go on to work with the subsequent Mark II and Mark III computers. She is often credited with coining the term “bug” for a computer malfunction: In 1947, she is said to have tweezed from the Mark II computer an actual moth that had been bugging up the machine, caught between Relay #70 and Panel F. She was also at the forefront of designing computers that would communicate to the user in a language similar to English, not in numbers. The language that she and her colleagues produced, Common Business-Oriented Language (COBOL), is still in use in 2013.
When, in 1982, David Letterman asked her how she knew so much about computers, in order to work with Mark I, her reply was: “I didn’t. It was the first one.”
by Elizabeth Barber, CS Monitor | Read more:
Image: Google, Inc.
