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Grace Hopper was born in New York, New York to Walter Fletcher Murray and Mary Campbell Van Horne. -
She graduated from Vassar College with degrees in mathematics and physics. -
She received her Master from Yale University in mathematics, after which she began teaching mathematics at Yale while pursuing her doctorate. -
She received her Ph.D. from Yale University in mathematics. -
She completed her sixty days of intensive training at the Midshipmen’s School for Women at Smith College in Northampton, Massachusetts, and joined the Naval Reserves. -
She became a lieutenant and was assigned to the Bureau of Ordnance’s Computation Project at Harvard University, where she worked on Mark I, the first large-scale automatic calculator and a precursor of electronic computers. -
She wrote the first computer manual, A Manual of Operation for the Automatic Sequence Controlled Calculator, which described how to operate Mark I and was the first extensive treatment of how to program a computer. -
She worked on the MARK II and MARK III computers under Navy contracts. At the end of her three-year term as a research fellow, she left Harvard because there were no permanent positions for women. While working on the Mark II the team discovered a moth gumming up the operation, from that point on fixing a mistake in the system became known as debugging.
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She joined the Eckert-Mauchly Computer Corporation in Philadelphia as a senior mathematician, where she designed one of the first compilers, which translated a programmer’s instructions into computer codes and coined the word compiler. -
While head programmer she worked on the design of UNIVAC I(the Universal Automatic Computer), the first commercial electronic computer. While working on the UNIVAC I and II, Hopper pioneered the idea of automatic programming and explored new ways to use the computer to code. -
She developed the first compiler called A-0, which translated mathematical code into machine-readable code—an important step toward creating modern programming languages. -
She proposed the idea of writing programs in words, rather than symbols, but she was told her idea would not work. Regardless, she continued working on an English-language compiler. -
She wrote the first English-like data-processing compiler, FLOW-MATIC for the UNIVAC II. -
She participated in CODASYL(the Conference on Data Systems Languages ), which consulted her to guide them in creating a machine-independent programming language. This led to the COBOL(Common Business Oriented Language)language, which was inspired by her idea of a language being based on English words. -
She retired from the Navy with the rank of commander. -
She was recalled to the Navy to help standardize the Navy’s multiple computer languages and programs. -
She was named the first computer science Man of the Year by the Data Processing Management Association. -
She received Yale’s Wilbur Lucius Cross Medal awarded to outstanding alumni. -
She became the first woman and the first American to become a Distinguished Fellow of the British Computer Society. -
She retired from the Naval Reserve and went to work as a senior consultant in public relations at the Digital Equipment Corporation, where she worked until her death. -
President George Bush awarded Hopper the National Medal of Technology and Innovation “for her pioneering accomplishments in the development of computer programming languages that simplified computer technology and opened the door to a significantly larger universe of users.” -
Grace Hopper died in Arlington, Virginia, and was buried with full military honors in Arlington National Cemetery. -
She was posthumously awarded the Presidential Medal of Freedom, the nation’s highest civilian honor.