Rear Admiral Grace Hopper on future possibilities: data, hardware, software and people (Part 1, 1982).
The late Rear Admiral Grace Hopper was a gifted mathematician and undisputed pioneer of computer programming who was posthumously awarded the Presidential Medal of Freedom in 2016. In her later career, she was also in high demand as a speaker. Hopper's famous 1982 lecture on “Future Possibilities: Data, Hardware, Software, and People” was not publicly available for a long time due to the outdated media on which it was recorded. The National Archives and Records Administration (NARA) eventually managed to recover the footage for the National Security Agency (NSA), which released the lecture in two parts on YouTube (Part 1 embedded above, Part 2 embedded below).
Hopper earned a bachelor's degree in mathematics and physics from Vassar College and a doctorate in mathematics from Yale University in 1930. She returned to Vassar as a professor, but when World War II broke out, she wanted to join the U.S. Naval Reserve. Her application was initially rejected because of her age (34) and low weight-to-height ratio, and also because her expertise in other areas made her particularly valuable to the war effort. Hopper received a special permit and, after graduating at the top of her class, joined the Bureau of Ships Computation Project at Harvard University, where she worked under Howard H. Aiken on the Mark I computer programming staff.
She stayed in the lab until 1949 and was subsequently hired as chief mathematician by the Eckert-Mauchly Computer Corporation to develop the Universal Automatic Computer (UNIVAC), the first computer. Hopper championed the development of a new programming language based on English words. “It is much easier for most people to write an English statement than to use symbols,” she argued. “So I decided that data processors should be able to write their programs in English and the computers would translate them into machine code.”
Her superiors were skeptical, but Hopper persisted and published papers on what she called compilers. When Remington Rand took over the company, she developed her first A-0 compiler. This early achievement eventually led to the development of COBOL for data processors, which remains the most widely used programming language today.
“Grandma COBOL”
In November 1952, UNIVAC was introduced to America by CBS news anchor Walter Cronkite as the presidential election results were coming in. Hopper and her team had worked tirelessly to input election statistics from previous elections and write the code that would allow the computer to extrapolate election results based on previous elections. National pollsters predicted a victory for Adlai Stevenson II, while the UNIVAC group predicted a landslide victory for Dwight D. Eisenhower. UNIVAC's prediction proved correct: Eisenhower won over 55 percent of the vote with a 442-89 electoral margin.
Hopper retired from the Naval Reserve in 1966 at age 60 with the rank of Commander, but was later recalled to active duty for many more years under special congressional authorization to remain on active duty past the mandatory retirement age. In 1983, she was promoted to Commodore, a rank that was renamed Rear Admiral two years later, and Rear Admiral Grace Hopper retired permanently in 1986. But she didn't stop working: She became a senior consultant at Digital Equipment Corporation and a “goodwill ambassador,” giving public lectures at various computer-related events.
One of Hopper's most famous lectures was given to NSA employees in August 1982. According to a National Security Agency press release, the footage had been preserved in an outdated media format – specifically, two 1-inch AMPEX tapes. The agency asked NARA to retrieve the footage and digitize it for release, which NARA did. The NSA described it as “one of the most unique proactive releases of transparency records to the public to date.”
Hopper was a very popular speaker not only because of her groundbreaking contributions to computing, but also because she was a natural raconteur, telling entertaining and often irreverent war stories from her early days. And she spoke plainly, as was evident in the 1982 lecture when she drew an analogy between using pairs of oxen to haul large logs in the days before the advent of large tractors and coupling computers together to get more processing power rather than simply buying a larger computer—“which, of course, common sense would have told us to do from the beginning.” For those interested in the history of computers and computation, the entire lecture is well worth the time.
Grace Hopper on Future Possibilities: Data, Hardware, Software and People (Part Two, 1982).
Listing image by Lynn Gilbert/CC BY-SA 4.0