U.S. Navy photo Rear Adm. Grace M. Hopper

As a pioneer computer programmer and co-inventor of COBOL (Common Business Oriented Language), she was known as the Grand Lady of Software, Amazing Grace and Grandma COBOL.

Hopper will be remembered for her now famous sayings, one of which is, ‘‘It’s easier to ask forgiveness than it is to get permission.”

It is only fitting that Grace Brewster Murray was born between two such memorable leaps in technology as the Wright Brothers’ first successful power-driven flight in 1903 and Henry Ford’s introduction of the Model T in 1908.

Taught by her father at an early age to go after what she wanted, Hopper’s life consisted of one success after another, including the significant contributions she made to the computer age and the Navy.

Hopper’s diligence and hard work paid off when in 1928 at the age of 22 she was graduated Phi Beta Kappa from Vassar College. She then attended Yale University, where she received a master’s degree in mathematics and physics in 1930 and a doctorate in mathematics in 1934.

Hopper began teaching mathematics at Vassar in 1931 where her first year’s salary was $800. She stayed there until she joined the United States Naval Reserve in December 1943.

Upon graduation, she was commissioned a Lt. (j.g) and ordered to the Bureau of Ordnance Computation Project at Harvard University. There, she became the first programmer on the Navy’s Mark I computer, the mechanical miracle of its day.

Hopper’s love of gadgets caused her to immediately fall for the biggest gadget she ever had seen, the 51-foot long, 8-foot tall, 8-foot wide, glass-encased mound of bulky relays, switches and vacuum tubes called the Mark I. This miracle of modern science could store 72 words and perform three additions every second.

Hopper’s love affair with the Mark I ended in a few short years when the UNIVAC I (Universal Automatic Computer), operating a thousand times faster, won her affections.

In 1946, Hopper was released from active duty and joined the Harvard Faculty at the Computation Laboratory where her work continued on the Mark II and Mark III computers for the Navy.

In 1949, she joined the Eckert-Mauchly Computer Corporation in Philadelphia, later called Sperry Rand, where she designed the first commercial, large-scale electronic computer called the UNIVAC I.

She changed the lives of everyone in the computer industry by developing the Bomarc system, later called COBOL. COBOL made it possible for computers to respond to words rather than numbers.

Hopper often jokingly explained, ‘‘It really came about because I couldn’t balance my checkbook.”

She also is credited with coining the term ‘‘bug” when she traced an error in the Mark II to a moth trapped in a relay. The bug was carefully removed and taped to a daily log book. Since then, whenever a computer has a problem, it’s referred to as a bug.

(From Chips, 2 no. 2, April 1992)