Grace Hopper

This woman made computers understand English.

At 7, Grace Hopper took apart every alarm clock in her house. Just to see what made them tick.

By 34, she had a PhD in math from Yale and a faculty job at Vassar.

But Hopper’s academic life ended after Pearl Harbor.

She wanted to serve.

The Navy said no... three times.

Too old.

Too skinny.

Too important already as a professor.

She didn’t care.

In 1943, she finally joined the U.S. Naval Reserve through WAVES.

She graduated first in her officer training class.

Her first assignment: Harvard’s Bureau of Ships Computation Project.

Her job? Help program one of the world’s first computers: Howard Aiken’s Mark I.

It was massive: 8 feet tall, 51 feet long, filled with 750,000 moving parts and 530 miles of wiring.

She wrote the first programming manual in history: 561 pages detailing how to operate the Mark I.

She also coined the term “debugging” after her team found a literal moth causing an error in the Mark II.

After the war, she turned down a full professorship at Vassar.

In 1949, she joined the Eckert-Mauchly Computer Corporation in Philadelphia as senior mathematician.

The company had created the ENIAC (the first all-electronic computer) and was now building the UNIVAC I: the first commercial digital computer.

Hopper became the lead programmer.

In 1952, her team developed the first-ever compiler, called A-0.

It translated more understandable commands into something computers could read.

In 1953, Hopper proposed that computer code should be written in English.

Not symbols or numbers. Just plain language that everyday business users could understand.

The response from her male colleagues? “Computers don’t understand English.”

She built it anyway.

Her team created FLOW-MATIC.

The first programming language to use English words like “IF,” “THEN,” and “GO TO.”

That led directly to COBOL (Common Business-Oriented Language).

In 1959, COBOL became the first standardized business coding language.

By the 1970s, it was the most widely used computer language in the world.

Throughout her career, she stayed in the Naval Reserve.

At 60, she was forced to retire.

But seven months later, they recalled her to active duty.

Why? The Navy’s computer systems were a mess... dozens of languages, no standards.

So Hopper standardized Navy programming practices and rewrote how the military handled software.

In 1983, President Ronald Reagan promoted her to commodore (later renamed rear admiral).

“If you ask me what accomplishment I’m most proud of, the answer would be all the young people I’ve trained over the years. That’s more important than writing the first compiler.”

Grace Hopper died in 1992 at age 85.

In 1996, the Navy named a missile destroyer after her: USS Hopper.

In 2016, she was posthumously awarded the Presidential Medal of Freedom.

Yale renamed one of its colleges after her.

And every year, over 30,000 women gather at the Grace Hopper Celebration.

The world’s largest tech conference for women.