first electromechanical computer in the USA. It weighed 9,000 pounds and had over 750,000 relays, switches, and control circuits, connected with 500 miles of wire. It was the first computer that could solve any arbitrary mathematical problem. It could do three additions per second. Young Lieutenant Hopper was one of its first programmers, making top secret calculations to help with ballistic calibrations. She wrote the user manual for the Mark I computer. Coders in those days worked with ones and zeros, The gutted clock lay on its face, guts strewn across the table. The girl puzzled at the intricate pieces, meshing them together, trying to understand how they worked to tell time. Grace loved taking things apart. Grace Hopper (née Murray) grew up in New York City, just a few years after its residents got electricity. Fascinated by technical things, she applied to Vassar at 16 but was rejected for poor grades in Latin. Undeterred, she applied again a year later, was accepted, and earned a bachelor’s degree in mathematics and physics. Grace went on to earn a masters degree and then a PhD in mathematics from Yale. She taught at Vassar while she worked on her Ph.D. In 1943, Grace joined the Naval Reserves and was assigned to the Ordinance Computation Project at Harvard. She was part of a team working with a newly designed IBM computer called the Mark I. It was the punching holes in cards or paper tape to indicate operations to be performed and the data involved. Programs were designed for specific machines, and coding was tedious and error prone. Grace was frustrated as her team struggled to produce calculations essential to the war effort. She felt there had to be a better way. When the war ended, Grace left the Navy to join the Eckert-Mauchly Corporation. Their engineers were designing the first electronic computer. It was called the UNIVAC 1. As Director of Programming Research, she developed her breakthrough idea. Hopper believed programs could be written in plain language that people could read and then translated into Grace Hopper A legendary computer pioneer the code a target machine needed. Tested pieces of code could be saved in libraries and then linked together as needed. The translator which would do this, a program itself, was called a “compiler”. In 1952, Grace wrote the A-0 (Arithmetic Language version 0) System, one of the first compilers, which translated mathematical formulae into machine-readable code. She built upon her experience to later help develop COBOL (Common Business Oriented Language), which became the dominant language for business applications and is still used today. Her work made computers accessible to people without engineering or math backgrounds. The Navy recalled Grace to active duty in 1967 to serve as Director of the Navy Programming Languages Group. She was promoted to Captain in 1973, and retired in 1986 as a Rear Admiral, the oldest serving officer in the Navy. Grace Hopper was a trailblazer. One of her favorite quotes was, “a ship in port is safe, but that is not what ships are for. Sail out to sea and do new things.” She received over 40 honorary degrees and numerous recognitions including the National Medal of Technology and (posthumously) the Presidential Medal of Freedom, the USA’s highest civilian honor. As a role model for women and minorities in maledominated fields, Grace Hopper encouraged risk taking. This is why she is still often referred to as “Amazing Grace.” Paper tape program for the Mark I Unknown Photographer (Smithsonian Institution) - Flickr: Grace Hopper and UNIVAC
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