I like the likes of Grace Hopper. She was a real smarty pants. The kind that speaks in an entirely different language. The language of computers, and the math that supports the programming behind them. She truly was, extraordinary, of historical proportions.
Grace was born way back in 1906 in New York City, and as a child was known to be of the curious sort. When she was seven years old, she wanted to learn how an alarm clock worked. So she completely dismantled one. And then another. And another. She took apart seven different clocks in the house before her mother realized what she was doing. From that point, she was given just one to tinker with. That was foreshadowing if I’ve ever seen it.
She’d grow up to be one of the fiercest computer programmers of her day. But first, she studied math at Vassar. After graduation, she enrolled at Yale, become the first woman ever to earn a Ph.D. from there in mathematics. I envy those smarty math people. They really know what to do when things don’t add up.
Anyway, she went on to be a math professor at Vassar until World War II rolled around. The war inspired her to join the Navy. Her granddad was a Navy man, hence the choice. She was commissioned as a lieutenant in June 1944. Since her mathematical background was so gleamingly sparkly, the Navy assigned her to a weighty detail within the Bureau of Ordnance Computation Project at Harvard University. And that is where she learned to program the Mark I computer.
For those that don’t know, the Harvard Mark I computer was used in the war effort and the Manhattan project from 1944. And of course, the Manhattan Project was a research and development undertaking during World War II that produced the first nuclear weapons.
One of the best stories came from after the war. She continued her computer work with the Mark II and the Mark III. They were having trouble with the Mark II. Something kept shorting it out. Hopper was the one who discovered a moth that was caught in one of the relays. She pulled it out with a tweezers, and called it, quite fittingly, “debugging.” Our now familiar term.
She seemed to be a total geek, continuing her work through a solid career in the private sector. Then, at age 60, she went back into the Navy, to tackle standardizing communication between different computer languages. No rest for the weary. Old Grace Hopper would remain with the Navy for 19 more years. When she retired at age 79, she was a rear admiral as well as the oldest serving officer in the service. That was in 1986.
She got lots of awards for her work, and I won’t bore you with the list, so you’ll have to trust me on this, or look it up yourself. She died on the first day of the year, in 1992. She passed in her sleep, of natural causes, probably dreaming of 1’s and 0’s lining up, this way and that. She was 85 years old.
I tell you, her working-life was truly amazing. But I always feel a little sad when I read biographies such as this. We only hear about the numbers churning about into computational logic. I hope she had happiness. And some fun. I hope she had someone, or a bunch of someones that she shared things with, like Strawberry Danishes, and episodes of the Flintstones during Prime Time. I hope someone knitted a sweater for her at Christmas, even if one arm was five inches longer than the other. And I’d like to think that she had a cute little dog named Roscoe, that sat on her lap, whenever she sat down in her favorite chair. I hope she had good moments of peace, and joy, and happy pleasures.
I hope those things for all of you, too.
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Computers are useless. They can only give you answers.
— Pablo Picasso
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Man is still the most extraordinary computer of all.
— John F. Kennedy
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The most compelling reason for most people to buy a computer for the home will be to link it to a nationwide communications network. We’re just in the beginning stages of what will be a truly remarkable breakthrough for most people – as remarkable as the telephone.
— Steve Jobs
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