Mother of Compilers
Grace Brewster Murray Hopper (1906-1992) the woman responsible for the development of Cobol, responsible for making computers accessible to everyone especially for women.
But who was she?
As many women interested in technology Grace suffered that computing was "oriented" only to men, but that did't stop her. She always did well at mathematics especially geometry which she liked a lot.
She went to Vassar College in New York to study maths, physics and engineering then shes moved to Yale in 1928 to gain a masters degree and then a doctorate in maths and mathematical physics. At that time she could only look forward to teaching maths at High School but she wanted more. Managing to reach teaching ranks like: instructor, assistant professor and finally associate professor.
With the USA entering the second world war Grace joined the US Naval Reserve. This choice was probably affected by the fact that her grandfather was a Rear Admiral. Unlike USA academics the Navy knew how valuable Hopper was. Assigning her to the Bureau of Ships Computation project at Harvard. It was there when she met Howard Aiken. Hopper was greeted by a book of instruction codes and the task of working out the interpolation coefficients for the inverse tangent function. Her time with Aiken served as her basic training in computing. She learned to program and she invented the term bug.
The story of the bug term is funny. The Mark I was acting up and giving incorrect results. An examination located the fault was a moth between the contacts. The moth was removed and taped into the machine´s log book with the note "First ACTUAL bug found". Grace and her colleagues then start to refer to programming errors as bugs and coin terms like "debugging the machine".
After the war Hopper spent some time programming actuarial tables and teaching in Harvard. Then she moved to the Eckert-Maunchly Corp. which at that time was completing the UNIVAC. Before the machine was available she programmed the BINAC (a small binary machine built in secret for the Snark Missile project).
In 1952 Hopper and her team at Remington wrote the A-0 the first compiler made. To make it work they had to invent many of the fundamental compiler techniques like translations. She also wrote the first symbolic differentiator, a calculus program.
With Fortran proving a high level language for the scientific community the business community felt a little left out. Cobol was the answer. Even when Grace was not a working member, her influence to this new language was enormous, no one doubt that she deserves to be called the mother of Cobol.
In 1983 she was promoted to the rank of Commodore in a ceremony at the White House and in 1985 she was promoted to Rear Admiral (just like her grandfather). She died in 1992.
What was her legacy?
She was concerned of young people and the future of programming, as she said:
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."
An important part of Grace Hopper's legacy was being a successful woman in an industry dominated by men. Her achievements set precedence for the future of women in computing.
References:
https://www.i-programmer.info/history/people/294-the-mother-of-cobol.html?start=1
https://vimeo.com/118556349
But who was she?
As many women interested in technology Grace suffered that computing was "oriented" only to men, but that did't stop her. She always did well at mathematics especially geometry which she liked a lot.
She went to Vassar College in New York to study maths, physics and engineering then shes moved to Yale in 1928 to gain a masters degree and then a doctorate in maths and mathematical physics. At that time she could only look forward to teaching maths at High School but she wanted more. Managing to reach teaching ranks like: instructor, assistant professor and finally associate professor.
With the USA entering the second world war Grace joined the US Naval Reserve. This choice was probably affected by the fact that her grandfather was a Rear Admiral. Unlike USA academics the Navy knew how valuable Hopper was. Assigning her to the Bureau of Ships Computation project at Harvard. It was there when she met Howard Aiken. Hopper was greeted by a book of instruction codes and the task of working out the interpolation coefficients for the inverse tangent function. Her time with Aiken served as her basic training in computing. She learned to program and she invented the term bug.
The story of the bug term is funny. The Mark I was acting up and giving incorrect results. An examination located the fault was a moth between the contacts. The moth was removed and taped into the machine´s log book with the note "First ACTUAL bug found". Grace and her colleagues then start to refer to programming errors as bugs and coin terms like "debugging the machine".
After the war Hopper spent some time programming actuarial tables and teaching in Harvard. Then she moved to the Eckert-Maunchly Corp. which at that time was completing the UNIVAC. Before the machine was available she programmed the BINAC (a small binary machine built in secret for the Snark Missile project).
In 1952 Hopper and her team at Remington wrote the A-0 the first compiler made. To make it work they had to invent many of the fundamental compiler techniques like translations. She also wrote the first symbolic differentiator, a calculus program.
With Fortran proving a high level language for the scientific community the business community felt a little left out. Cobol was the answer. Even when Grace was not a working member, her influence to this new language was enormous, no one doubt that she deserves to be called the mother of Cobol.
In 1983 she was promoted to the rank of Commodore in a ceremony at the White House and in 1985 she was promoted to Rear Admiral (just like her grandfather). She died in 1992.
What was her legacy?
She was concerned of young people and the future of programming, as she said:
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."
An important part of Grace Hopper's legacy was being a successful woman in an industry dominated by men. Her achievements set precedence for the future of women in computing.
References:
https://www.i-programmer.info/history/people/294-the-mother-of-cobol.html?start=1
https://vimeo.com/118556349
Comentarios
Publicar un comentario