Computer Science => COBOL language

Grace Hopper was an American computer scientist, mathematician, and United States Navy rear admiral. She was a pioneer of computer programming and credited with writing the first computer manual, ‘A Manual of Operation for the Automatic Sequence Controlled Calculator’.

Grace Hopper was born in 1906 in New York City, US.

She earned a Ph.D. in both mathematics and mathematical physics from Yale University and was a professor of mathematics at Vassar College.

Hopper tried to be commissioned in the Navy early in World War II, however she was turned down. At age 34, she was too old to enlist and her weight-to-height ratio was too low. She was also denied on the basis that her job as a mathematician and mathematics professor at Vassar College was valuable to the war effort.

However, during the war in 1943, Hopper obtained a leave of absence from Vassar and was sworn into the United States Navy Reserve; she was one of many women who volunteered to serve in the WAVES.

In 1949, she joined the Eckert–Mauchly Computer Corporation and was part of the team that developed the UNIVAC I computer. At Eckert–Mauchly she managed the development of one of the first COBOL compilers.

“I decided data processors ought to be able to write their programs in English, and the computers would translate them into machine code,” she said. This idea was not accepted for three years. In the meantime, she published her first paper on the subject, compilers, in 1952.

She was one of the first programmers on the Harvard Mark I computer.

By 1952, Hopper had finished her program linker (originally called a compiler), which was written for the A-0 System. In 1954, Eckert–Mauchly chose Hopper to lead their department for automatic programming, and she led the release of some of the first compiled languages like FLOW-MATIC. In 1959, she participated in the CODASYL consortium, helping to create a machine-independent programming language called COBOL (an acronym for COmmon Business-Oriented Language), which was based on her idea of compiling English words to machine code. Hopper promoted the use of the language throughout the 60s. COBOL is still in use today.

She was well known for her lively and irreverent speaking style, as well as a rich treasury of early war stories. She received the nickname “Grandma COBOL”.

The U.S. Navy Arleigh Burke-class guided-missile destroyer USS Hopper was named for her, as was the Cray XE6 “Hopper” supercomputer at NERSC, and the Nvidia GPU architecture “Hopper”.

During her lifetime, Hopper was awarded 40 honorary degrees from universities across the world. A college at Yale University was renamed in her honor.

Eventually she retired from the Navy for good in 1986. At the time, she was the oldest serving member of the Navy and had reached the rank of commodore/rear-admiral.

Hopper was awarded the Defense Distinguished Service Medal, the highest non-combat decoration awarded by the Department of Defense.

She died in 1992 at age 85 in Virginia, US.