The perhaps little-known story of Grace Hopper (1906-1992) transcends its time. She She was the first recognized female hackerpaved the way for the normalization of women’s work in the technology sector and has forever changed the way people interact with computers.
His greatest contributions have to do with this the development of programming languages and the inclusion of women in computer science. An episode from 1941 would have a major influence on this course.
That year, Japan attacked the US base at Pearl Harbor in Hawaii. Smithsonian Magazine recalls that she, her brother and her husband wanted to join the armed forces.
So that summer, Hopper taught an accelerated training course for military mathematicians at Barnard College. “When I was at Barnard, the midshipmen from the training ship downstream would pass this dorm every day, and the more they passed, the more I wanted to be in the Navy,” she said.
Grace Murray Hopper He was born in New York into a family with a strong military tradition. Your inclinations Scientists have manifested themselves since childhoodwhen he showed himself special interest in mathematics and mechanical devices.
He studied at Vassar College, where In 1928 he completed his studies in mathematics and physics with honors. Afterward, He earned a master’s degree (1930) and a doctorate (1934) in mathematics at Yale University, which was not natural for a woman in those years.
After receiving her doctorate, she worked as a mathematics professor at Vassar. As expected, he decided to join the Navy in 1943. She left her academic position to join the Navy WAVES (Women Accepted for Voluntary Emergency Service). She was assigned to the Bureau of Ordnance Computation Project at Harvard, where she helped develop the Harvard Mark I, one of the first electromechanical computers. According to the University of Granada, Spain, she was the third person to program the system.
During World War II, he devoted himself to perfecting the capabilities of computing machines. His tasks included the development of a manual and the further development of programming techniques.
Hopper is famous for this coined the term bug to refer to errors in software, after a moth was found causing problems in a relay on the Harvard Mark II, which also led to the now famous practice of debugging.
Hopper’s greatest contribution was the development of the first compiler, a tool that translates human instructions into machine code. The vision was clear: to make computers more accessible and allow more people to program without knowing the specific language of the hardware.
This revolutionary idea led to the development of high-level languages and led to the Birth of COBOL (Common Business-Oriented Language) in the 1950s. This language is still used in business and banking systems today due to its robustness and clarity.
His work at Eckert-Mauchly and then Remington-Rand and Univac allowed him to lead innovation teams for decades. She always combined her technical career with military service and achieved the rank of rear admiral, making her the first to achieve this rank in the navy.