"Amazing Grace" in her workplace (Image found on Google)
Today I learned and started to admire the life and work of Rear Admiral Grace Hopper, who would have been 107 today. It’s very difficult to imagine, as I sit here reading about her on the internet, that people used to use things like paper and pencils and chalk and slide rules to solve (and often not solve) complicated problems.
Some awesome stuff she did: Grace Hopper developed first compiler, allowing computer calculations to move beyond simple arithmetic and into more complex problems. She also developed first standardized computer language, COBOL, which laid the groundwork for all the languages we use today.
One day she found a dead moth disrupting one of the electronic relays in the Mark 1 computer, and upon removing it (and fixing the computer), the term “debugging" was born. Awesome! And beyond that, she was a charming scientific communicator, and possessed a marvelous ability to make people, and remember this was in a time when almost no one owned their own computer, truly appreciate both the importance and the complexity of computing technology.
Some awesome stuff she did: Grace Hopper developed first compiler, allowing computer calculations to move beyond simple arithmetic and into more complex problems. She also developed first standardized computer language, COBOL, which laid the groundwork for all the languages we use today.
One day she found a dead moth disrupting one of the electronic relays in the Mark 1 computer, and upon removing it (and fixing the computer), the term “debugging" was born. Awesome! And beyond that, she was a charming scientific communicator, and possessed a marvelous ability to make people, and remember this was in a time when almost no one owned their own computer, truly appreciate both the importance and the complexity of computing technology.
~Ally
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