Grace Hopper

3 Key excerpts on "Grace Hopper"

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  The Future of Tech Is Female

  How to Achieve Gender Diversity

  • Douglas M. Branson(Author)
  • 2018(Publication Date)
  • NYU Press

    (Publisher)

  Part II

  A History of Women in Information Technology

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  5

  Once upon a Time

  In our society and many others, “women hold up half the sky.”1 Here in the United States, for example, women earn 60 percent of the bachelor’s degrees and 50 percent of the doctorates. One would think that something similar would be true of the cutting-edge information technology industry. Certainly at one point there were signs of a trend toward a semblance of gender equality.

  Precursors

  Grace Murray Hopper (1906–1992) was one of the pioneers. In the 1950s she pioneered the use of COBOL (Common Business-Oriented Language), a ubiquitous language for early generations of computer programmers. In doing so, Grace Hopper spearheaded the movement toward computer languages as close to English as possible, rather than machine code or languages close to machine code that others promoted. She was instrumental in the development of the first widely used mainframe computer, the UNIVAC by Remington Rand.2

  Much if not all of the time she was doing these things, Dr. Hopper was an officer in the U.S. Navy, first as a reserve officer and later as a regular. After Dr. Hopper’s retirement, the U.S. Congress took the extraordinary step of awarding her the one-star rank of commodore, just below rear admiral, the Navy’s two-star rank (unlike the other services, the Navy ordinarily does not award the one-star rank). Her name “graces” the transom of a U.S. Navy guided missile destroyer, the Hopper (DDG 70), known in the fleet as the “Amazing Grace.” In 2017 Yale University renamed Calhoun College, originally named after John C. Calhoun, senator from South Carolina and a Yale graduate, Grace Hopper College, after Grace M. Hopper, also a Yale University graduate.

  Closer to the subject, each year there is a Grace Hopper Conference, a technical meeting of up to ten thousand women interested in computer science and related subjects. Microsoft Research awards the Grace Murray Hopper prize “to the outstanding young computer professional of the year, selected on the basis of a single recent major technical or service contribution.”3

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  The Computing Universe

  A Journey through a Revolution

  • Tony Hey, Gyuri Pápay(Authors)
  • 2014(Publication Date)
  • Cambridge University Press

    (Publisher)

  Probably the most famous is Grace Hopper, or Rear Admiral Professor Grace Hopper as she later became (B.3.3). Hopper received her PhD in mathematics from Yale University in 1934 and was teaching at Vassar College in Poughkeepsie, New York, when the United States entered World War II. She enlisted in the Naval Reserve in December 1943 and graduated at the top of her class in June 1944. The Harvard Mark I of Howard Aiken had been commandeered for the war effort, and Aiken was now a Naval Reserve commander (B.3.4). He liked to say that he was the first naval officer in history who commanded a computer. Although Aiken’s machine was not very influential on the future development of digital computers, Aiken was one of the first to recognize the importance of program- ming as a discipline. He persuaded Harvard to start the first master’s degree courses in what would now be called computer science. In addition he insisted that the Mark I project be staffed with trained mathematicians. And this is how Lieutenant Grace Hopper of the U.S. Navy found herself being greeted by Aiken in the summer of 1944: [Howard Aiken] waved his hand and said: “That’s a computing machine.” I said, “Yes, Sir.” What else could I say? He said he would Fig. 3.4. The information stored in a computer’s memory is much like a stack of plates. Just as we can add or take plates only from the top of the stack, the last data added to memory must be the first removed. B.3.3. Grace Hopper (1906–92), an American computer scientist, led the team that developed COBOL, the first programming language for business that allowed programmers to use everyday words. The Computing Universe 48 like to have me compute the coefficients of the arc tangent series, for Thursday. Again, what could I say? “Yes, Sir.” I did not know what on earth was happening, but that was my meeting with Howard Hathaway Aiken.

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  Gender Codes

  Why Women Are Leaving Computing

  • Thomas J. Misa(Author)
  • 2011(Publication Date)
  • Wiley-IEEE Computer Society Pr

    (Publisher)

  12.3 ). Hopper was even named as the Data Processing Management Association’s first “man of the year” in 1971 (as noted in Chapters 3 and 6 in this volume), the first of her many significant honors and awards. Recently, with the annual Grace Hopper Celebration of Women in Computing, she has become an icon with literally thousands of webpage entries. Yet, amazingly enough, the first serious scholarly biography about Hopper was just published in 2009 [6].

  Figure 12.3. Grace Hopper as prophet of high-level programming languages. Grace Hopper (1906–1992) programmed Harvard’s Mark I computer (1944–1949) and helped developed the UNIVAC (1949–1966), for which she wrote the world’s first compiler in 1952. Her ideas on higher-level programming inspired COBOL. She directed the Navy Programming Languages Group (1967–1977), eventually retiring as Rear Admiral.

  (Courtesy of Charles Babbage Institute.)

  The achievements and celebrations of many additional women in computing are still awaiting full treatment. Chapters 10 and 11 in this volume are notable efforts to recount the experiences of women computer-science pioneers as well as women information-technology entrepreneurs. We hope that telling their stories is a step toward a more accurate and complete image of computing. Yet for each of these justly celebrated women, there were thousands of women who worked as ill-paid keypunch operators or computer operators. An important historical lesson is that the “information revolution” that we most frequently associate with electronic digital computers, emerging in the 1950s, has an older and deeper history. Information was transformed from continuously varying qualities or measurements into standard quantified units, that is, digitized, and literally punched onto cards much earlier than the invention of electronic computers that came along to speed up the calculations and sorting of this information. Already by the 1920s, a generation after Herman Hollerith tabulated the 1890 U.S. Census, a sizable punch-card industry had sprung up in the United States and also across the industrial countries of western Europe [7]. In most places the industry had a largely female workforce, and in the 1950s when electronic business computers were introduced by Remington Rand, IBM, and other companies, these computers were literally grafted onto or merged into a company’s existing punch-card operations. In this way, electronic business computing did not create “new” gendered work conditions. Instead, business computing was strongly shaped by existing gender expectations, policies, and practices in the workforce (see Chapters 3, 4, and 5 in this volume).

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