How Grace Hopper Helped Jumpstart the Computer Age

Imagine a machine the size of a school bus. Peek inside and you find 760,000 little bits and pieces. You’ve never seen anything like it. Now you’re asked to work with that machine. And your boss doesn’t want you there, because you’re a woman. Sound scary? Fortunately, Grace Hopper wasn’t easily scared. In fact, Grace said the Mark 1 machine just aroused her “insatiable curiosity.”

When Grace was a little girl, she preferred tinkering with construction toys over playing with dolls. “I built everything, ships, railroad cars, bridges,” she remembered. And she liked taking things apart to see how they worked. Things like alarm clocks. When she opened one up, springs and gears tumbled out. She needed to take apart a second clock to see where things went. And so on. She ruined seven alarm clocks before she understood how they worked. She probably thought about those clocks when she advised students to act in the moment when curiosity struck

Grace excelled at math. She studied math in college and worked as a math professor when very few women entered the field. Then World War II started. Because she wanted to help win the war, she enlisted in the US Navy. Her bosses there, not knowing what to do with a woman, sent her to Harvard University to work with one of the first big computers: The Mark 1.

It was 1943. Grace – and most other people – knew nothing about computers. But she wasted no time in figuring them out. She liked big challenges, she said, because “every time you solve a problem, another one shows up behind it.” Soon she surprised her coworkers and bosses with ideas to improve the machines. One of her inventions is called a compiler. It saved programmers a lot of time by storing pieces of code, which they used over and over again, inside the computer. The computer would just call that piece of information up again when asked. Programmers loved it – and Grace for developing it – because it took care of a boring chore.

The language of computers has just two digits: 0s and 1s. Programmers had to type long sequences of those two digits. Mistakes were common. Only specialists could do the job. But Grace thought that computers should work for everyone. So she wrote a program that helped a computer translate human language into the digital format it works with. Now people could write commands in English or any other language. The program was named FLOW-MATIC. It helped scientists develop the first computer language.

Her accomplishments earned Grace the nickname “Amazing Grace.” People admired her for her inventions. And for her sense of humor. Once, when a computer stopped working, her team discovered that a dead moth had gummed up a relay. Grace retrieved the insect and pasted it into the lab’s logbook. Next to it, she wrote: “First actual case of bug being found.” Since then, computer errors have been called bugs. At one of her workplaces, she hung a clock that ran backward. It was her funny way of reminding everyone to be open to change. She hated the phrase “but that’s how we’ve always done it.”

Grace’s inventions gave computer science a big boost. She was convinced that computers would become an important part of everyday life. How right she was! To speed things up she trained many young scientists in the field. She rallied them, saying: “Dare and do.” After her death, the US Navy named a ship in her honor. The motto written in the USS Hopper’s coat of arms reads “aude et effice” – Latin for “dare and do.”

Glossary

Grace Hopper (1906 – 1992): Computer scientist and mathematician. Her inventions made computers easier to program and use.

Mark 1: The computer was one of the first digital calculators. It was 51 feet (15.5 meters) long and eight feet high (2.4 meters) high. Programmers used paper tape with holes punched into it to give it instructions.

Compiler: A program that enabled computers to store pieces of code and later retrieve them. It helps programmers save time.

Code: A series of numbers, letters, and symbols that are used to give instructions to a computer.

Digital: The two-digit alphabet, consisting of 0s and 1s, used by computers.

FLOW-MATIC: A program that made it possible to instruct computers using human language.

Illustrations republished with permission from the book “Grace Hopper: Queen of Computer Code” written by Laurie Wallmark and illustrated by Katy Wu (Sterling Publishing Co Inc)