Grace Hopper with one of the first compilers created, the COBOL compiler.
A timeline of Grace Hopper's life
1906 - born Grace Brewster Murray on December 9, in New York City, U.S.
1928 - graduates Phi Beta Kappa from Vassar College with a bachelor's degree in mathematics and physics
1930 - earns her master's degree at Yale University and marries New York University professor Vincent Foster Hopper
1931 - begins teaching mathematics at Vassar
1934 - earns a Ph.D. in mathematics from Yale
1941 - gets promoted to associate professor at Vassar
1943 - enlist in the United States Navy Reserve and trains at the Naval Reserve Midshipmen's School at Smith College in Northampton, Massachusetts
1944 - graduates and is assigned as a lieutenant to the Bureau of Ships Computation Project at Harvard University, where she serves on the programming staff of Mark I, the first large-scale automatic calculator and a precursor of electronic computers
1945 - divorces Vincent Foster Hopper but retains his surname
1946 - writes 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
1947 - while working on a Mark II Computer her associates discover a moth that was stuck in a relay and impeding the operation of the computer. Upon extraction, the insect was affixed to a log sheet for that day with the notation, "First actual case of bug being found". The case is held as a historical instance of "debugging" a computer and Hopper is credited with popularizing the term in computing.
It was warm in the summer of 1945; the windows were always open and the screens were not very good. One day the Mark II stopped when a relay failed. They finally found the cause of the failure: inside one of the relays, beaten to death by the contacts, was a moth. The operator carefully fished it out with tweezers, taped it in the logbook, and wrote under it "first actual bug found".
– Kathleen Broome Williams
1949 - joins the Eckert-Mauchly Computer Corp., where she works on the design of UNIVAC I, the first general-purpose electronic digital computer design for business application, as head programmer
1952 - publishes her first paper on compilers, which she designed to translate a programmer’s instructions into computer codes, even though she was told very quickly that [she] couldn't do this because computers didn't understand English.
It's much easier for most people to write an English statement than it is to use symbols, so I decided data processors ought to be able to write their programs in English, and the computers would translate them into machine code.
The same year she finishes the first link-loader, which at the time was referred to as a compiler (the A compiler).
1953 - her division develops A-2 system and releases it to customers. Customers were provided the source code for A-2 and invited to send their improvements back to UNIVAC. Thus, A-2 could be considered an example of the result of an early philosophy similar to free and open-source software
1957 - her division develops Flow-Matic, the first English-language data-processing compiler, which had many features that inspired the development of COBOL, granting her the nickname "Grandma COBOL"
1986 - retires from the navy with the rank of rear admiral as the oldest officer on active U.S. naval duty
1992 - dies in her sleep of natural causes at her home in Arlington County, Virginia, at age 85, and is interred with full military honors in Arlington National Cemetery
2016 - posthumously receives the Presidential Medal of Freedom, the nation’s highest civilian honor, in recognition of her remarkable contributions to the field of computer science
If it's a good idea, go ahead and do it. It's much easier to apologize than it is to get permission.
