Grace Hopper Research Paper

Grace Hopper- The First Lady of Software

Grace Brewster Murray Hopper (December 9, 1906 – January 1, 1992) was an American computer scientist and the United States Navy Rear Admiral. Hopper is the first lady of the software world. She helped develop a compiler that was a pioneer to the widely used COBOL (an acronym for Common Business-Oriented Language) language.

Summary

Grace Hopper was born in New York City in 1906. In 1944, she joined U.S Navy during World War II and was assigned to program Mark I computer. Hopper served on the Mark I computer programming staff headed by Howard H. Aiken. Hopper and Aiken both coauthored three papers on the Mark I. It was also known as the Automatic Sequence Controlled Calculator. It’s believed that

As she was a research fellow at Harvard, she got an opportunity to work with Mark II and Mark III computers. When Hopper was working with Harvard, a moth was found to have shorted out Mark II. Since then, Hopper has been getting the credit for the invention of the term “computer bug.” However, she was not the one to pen it down, but she somehow helped to popularize it.

Hopper moved into private industry in 1949, to continue working with computers. She has worked with Eckert-Mauchly Computer Corporation and Remington Rand. There, she supervised programming for the UNIVAC

This compiler was a pioneer for the Common Business Oriented Language, accessible as COBOL, a widely adapted language used around the world. Hopper encouraged its adaptation Although she didn’t invent it.

Awards and Achievements

In the course of her lifetime, Grace Hopper was given 40 honorary degrees from universities around the world, along with numerous awards and honors including:

• First winner of “Computer Science Man of the Year” award from the Data Processing Management Association in 1969

• The first person from the United States and the first woman from any country to be made Distinguished Fellow of the British Computer Society in 1973

• The first female to receive the National Medal of Technology as an individual in 1991

Return to the Navy

In 1966, Hopper retired from the Naval Reserve. Her pioneering computer work recalled to active duty. At the age of 60, she was remembered to tackle standardizing communication between different computer languages. For 19 years, she was there with the Navy. In 1986, when she retired from the services, she aged 79 and was a rear admiral. She too was the oldest serving officer at that