Grace Hopper

Computer Scientist, Mathematician, United States Navy Rear Admiral - and Developer of the First Computer Compiler

A Timeline of Grace Hopper's Life

• 1906 - born in New York City as the eldest of three children
• 1928 - graduates from Vassar College with a bachelor’s degree in mathematics and physics as a member of Phi Beta Kappa, the oldest and most prestigious academics honors society in the United States
• 1930 - graduates from Yale University with a master’s degree in mathematics and marries Vincent Foster Hopper (1906 - 1970), a professor at New York University
• 1934 - earns her Ph.D. in mathematics from Yale University
• 1941 - is promoted to associate professor at Vassar & tries to enlist in the Navy but is rejected for her age (34) and a weight-to-height ratio that was deemed too low
• 1943 - takes a leave of absence from Vassar and is sworn into the United States Navy Reserve
• 1944 - graduates first in her class at Naval Reserve Midshipmen School at Smith College (Northampton, Massachusetts) and is assigned to the Bureau of Ships Computation Project at Harvard University as a lieutenant, junior grade. There she served on the computer programming staff headed by Howard H. Aiken
• 1949 - joins Eckert-Mauchly Computer Corporation as a senior mathematician where she is a member of the team that develops the UNIVAC I, the first known large-scale computer to be on the market in 1950; Hopper also serves as UNIVAC director of Automatic Programming Development for Remington Rand
• 1952 - Hopper publishes her first paper about her idea of compilers that compile the English language into machine code because this would make programming a lot easier for people; the first program of this sort was called the A compiler with its first version A-0; her first working link-loader (which was referred to as a compiler at that time) was met with skepticism. The common understanding was that computers “only do arithmetic”
• 1954 - is named the company’s first director of automatic programming; her department released some of the first compiler-based programming languages, including MATH-MATIC and FLOW-MATIC
• 1959 - Hopper serves as a technical consultant to the Conference on Data Systems Languages (CODASYL) committee, which many of her former employees served on; the committee defines COBOL (Common Business-Oriented Language) which extends Hopper’s FLOW-MATIC with some ideas from IBM’s COMTRAN
• 1966 - in accordance with Navy attrition regulations, Hopper retires from the Naval Reserve with the rank of commander at age 60 at the end of the year
• 1967She is recalled to active duty in August for a six-month period which turns into an indefinite assignment.
• 1967 - until 1977, Hopper serves as the director of the Navy Programming Languages Group in the Navy’s Office of Information Systems Planning where she develops validation software for COBOL and its compiler as part of a COBOL standardization program for the entire Navy
• 1970s - during this decade, Hopper advocates for the Defense Department to replace large, centralized systems with networks of small, distributed computers. She develops the implementation of standards for testing computer systems and components, most significantly for early programming languages such as FORTRAN and COBOL. The Navy tests for conformance to these standards led to significant convergence among the programming language dialects of the major computer vendors
• 1971 - Hopper again retires but is again asked to return to active duty in 1972
• 1973 - is promoted to the rank of captain
• 1980s - Hopper's standard conformance tests (and their official administration) are assumed by the National Bureau of Standards (NBS), known today as the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST)
• 1983 - promotion to commodore by special Presidential appointment by President Ronald Reagan. Hopper remains on active duty for several years beyond mandatory retirement by special approval of Congress.
• 1985 - the rank of commodore is renamed rear admiral (lower half) and Hopper becomes one of the Navy's few female admirals
• 1986 - after more than 42 years, Rear Admiral Hopper takes retirement from the Navy. At a celebration held in Boston on the USS Constitution to commemorate her retirement, Hopper is awarded the Defense Distinguished Service Medal, the highest non-combat decoration awarded by the Department of Defense. Following her retirement from the Navy, she gets hired as a senior consultant to Digital Equipment Corporation (DEC)
• 1992 - dies at age 85 and is interred with full military honors in Arlington National Cemetery (Virginia)

Quote

"The most important thing I've accomplished, other than building the compiler is training young people. They come to me, you know, and say, 'Do you think we can do this?' I say, 'Try it.' And I back 'em up. They need that. I keep track of them as they get older and I stir 'em up at intervals, so they don't forget to take chances."

For more information about her, see Grace Hopper's Wikipedia page.