Drone_pilot
07-08-07, 19:06
read this article Whilst waiting for an operation on Monday it's very interesting.
AMAZING GRACE
First Lady of Computers
BY J.A.N. LEE (From the Readers Digest NOV 1994)
Who would have thought this tiny naval officer would forge an industry by bullying everyone from businessmen to the Pentagon?
WHAT first struck me about Grace Hopper was her size. At 57, she was a tiny wisp of a woman. Could this be the larger than life pioneer who had led us into the computer age?
Slipping into a chair, she hauled a battered leather briefcase on to the conference table. She wore a full dress US Navy uniform with commander’s stripes and a chestful of service ribbons. Her blue eyes crackled with vigour. “Unless we come up with a standard programming language,” Grace warned our group that afternoon, “the computer industry is dead in the water.”
The occasion was a 1964 meeting of the Business Equipment Manufacturing Association in New York. The subject was one of her favourites: the need to knock down the “Tower of Babble” that made computers so difficult to use.
Since each machine produced at that time was unique, people had to master
a new language brimming with mathematical symbols every time they used a different one.
As Grace launched into a riveting discussion on computer languages before some of the top thinkers in the field, I could see she was a born teacher. She had all the participants glued to their seats. “If you have 20 different light-bulb sizes, you need 20 different sockets,” Grace pointed out. “It’s the same with computers we’ve got to standardize.”
That day marked the beginning of my long friendship with “Amazing Grace”.
Even though she’d been there for the birth of the computer, what I couldn’t foresee was the enormous impact she would continue to have on the computer business, on the thousands of students who heard her lecture – and on me.
By then, at 29, I had graduated from Nottingham University and was a computer scientist at the University of Massachusetts – and already
a pretty good lecturer. But Grace’s example would help me bring lessons to life with colourful words and vivid examples.
Not long after our first meeting, I invited Grace to speak to my students. On the way from the airport, she chattered non-stop, bombarding me with questions and talking about her first love: computers. At that time, they were huge and rare and available only to professional programmers. But Grace assured me that computers would one day be small enough to sit on a desk, far more powerful than we could then imagine, and available to anyone at any time – in offices, schools, the home.
We’re already well on our way into that future, with 20 per cent of all British homes now having at least one computer. Much of the credit for this goes to Grace, who helped educate an industry. “I hope history will show”, she once told me, “that I was a pretty good teacher.”
Before teachers can teach, they must learn – and Grace started early. At seven, deciding she wanted to know how clocks worked, she dismantled her bedroom clock and then moved on to another. Later, Grace's mother found every alarm clock in the house in pieces. Grace was punished, but she knew how clocks worked. Grace Murray Hopper had a happy, active childhood in New York but her father suffered from hardening of the arteries and had to have both legs amputated in his forties.
Fitted with wooden legs and aided by canes, he went to his office, where he worked as an insurance broker, by train every day until his death at 74. Grace both admired and learned from her father’s fighting spirit. And with her analytical mind, she did well in school, excelling in science and mathematics. After graduating from Vassar College, New York, she earned a PhD in mathematics from Yale. By then, she had also married Vincent Hopper, an English lecturer at New York University. Returning to Vassar, she was made an associate professor of mathematics.
During the Second World War, she joined the navy. In one of those serendipitous moments that can alter history, the navy in 1944 assigned Grace to the Bureau of Ordnance Computation Project at Harvard University. There, navy scientist Lieutenant-Commodore Howard Aiken had developed the first fully functional digital computing machine. Called
Harvard Mark I, the machine was a marvel of its time. “It was the biggest, fanciest gadget I’d ever seen,”Grace told me. “I had to discover how it worked.” With 750,000 parts and 500 miles of electrical wire, Harvard Mark I could tear through calculations in a day that would take six months manually.
Under Grace’s guiding hand, it churned out ballistic tables for aiming Naval guns, schedules for supplying ships, even top-secret calculations that helped develop the atomic bomb.
Mark I was soon replaced by the faster Mark II. One day in 1945, the new machine suddenly choked on a simple calculation. Pulling out her pocket mirror and peering behind the front panel, Grace spotted the problem: a moth had perched on a relay. When the relay snapped shut, it flattened the moth between its contacts, and the computer stopped running. Grace and her team removed the squashed insect with tweezers. Then they taped the dead moth into a log book and scrawled next to it: “First actual case of a bug being found.” The event gave Grace an excuse whenever Aiken stormed in and demanded, “Why aren't you making numbers?" "Because", she would reply with a sly smile, “we’re debugging the computer.” The term stuck.
When the war ended, Grace accepted a commission in the Naval Reserve. She also became a senior mathematician for a Pennsylvania firm working on UNIVAC, the world’s first fully electronic commercial computer. By then, Grace and her husband had divorced amicably.
Most experts believed that computers were simply too complicated and expensive for anyone but highly trained scientists to understand. But Grace scoffed at this. If computers were easier to operate, she insisted, more people would use them.
To make her point, Grace began working on a “compiler” to translate ordinary English words into numerals – ones and zeros – that a computer could understand. Her colleagues told her this was a waste of time. But by 1955, Grace had unveiled a prototype programming language containing some 20 ordinary words – business terms such as inventory, price and product – that UNIVAC could understand. This breakthrough ultimately led to COBOL. (Common Business-Orientated Language). Along with FORTRAN, developed by John Backus of IBM for scientific problems, COBOL revolutionized the computer industry. Almost anyone could now “talk” with computers and use them to keep records and manage inventories.
In December 1966, at the age of 60, Grace was mandatorily retired from the navy. It was the saddest day of her life. However, her sadness was short-lived.
The Vietnam War had intensified, and despite COBAL, the navy’s computers couldn’t communicate with one another, and millions of pounds’ worth of supplies were getting lost. Thus, in August 1967, the navy recalled Grace to “temporary" active duty. Her mission: to make all the navy's computers work smoothly together in six months. Grace’s “temporary” tour of duty stretched into two decades. Not only did she tweak the navy’s computers into co-operating .but she discovered a new calling: that of computer evangelist, educator and prophet. Soon she was spending some 300 days a year on the road, lecturing around the country.
I invited Grace to address my students as often as possible. They loved her, and she loved them, my favourite of her techniques was the way she illustrated the speed at which computers operated. She would hold up a piece of wire. “This is a nanosecond,” she announced. “It’s 11-8 inches long. It’s the exact distance an electrical signal travels in a billionth of a second.” Then Grace went on to illustrate other concepts of time. “This is how far electricity travels in a millionth a second,” she would say, hauling out of a spool of wire 984 feet long. Finally, she apologized for not having a piece of wire small enough to hold a Pico-second, a trillionth of a second. “Go to a fast-food restaurant, and you'll get a packet of picoseconds there. They’re labelled ‘pepper’.” Above all, Grace urged students to stand by their beliefs and principles, and to believe in themselves. “Take risks” she admonished them. “A ship in port is safe, but that is not what ships are for. Sail out to sea and do new things.
Awards and honours flowed to Grace. She earned 40 honorary doctorates and was the first American to he made a Distinguished Fellow by the British Computer Society. Because of her age her promotion to captain in 1973 and then commodore in 1983 took special acts of Congress, In November 1985, Congress again conferred special recognition, elevating Grace to rear-admiral – the first woman to hold that rank. Finally, just four months shy of her eightieth birthday, Admiral Grace Murray Hopper’s retirement ceremony took place – at her request on board “Old Ironsides”, built in 1797 and the oldest commissioned ship in the navy. “We belong together,” Grace said. “After all, I’m the oldest sailor in the navy.”
I was in Britain when my wife phoned on New Year’s Day, 1992: "Grace died in her sleep last night." Admiral Grace Murray Hopper was buried with full military honours on January 7, 1992. When the family entered the chapel, an organist played “Amazing Grace”.
In many ways, Grace will live on with all of us. The navy has named its Data Automation Centre in San Diego after her, and a new guided-missile destroyer – the USS Hopper – will soon patrol the seas. But the memorial that would probably please Grace the most is the one that recurs every autumn as students return to college with books – and, more and more, personal computers.
http://www.arlingtoncemetery.net/ghopper-01.jpg
USS Hopper (http://www.militaryimages.net/photopost/showphoto.php/photo/27279/limit/recent)
Bute J.A,N. Lee, is one of the world’s Leading experts on computer languages.
He is currently a professor of computer science at Virginia Tech, and
Editor-in-chief, of the US Annals of the History of Computing.
AMAZING GRACE
First Lady of Computers
BY J.A.N. LEE (From the Readers Digest NOV 1994)
Who would have thought this tiny naval officer would forge an industry by bullying everyone from businessmen to the Pentagon?
WHAT first struck me about Grace Hopper was her size. At 57, she was a tiny wisp of a woman. Could this be the larger than life pioneer who had led us into the computer age?
Slipping into a chair, she hauled a battered leather briefcase on to the conference table. She wore a full dress US Navy uniform with commander’s stripes and a chestful of service ribbons. Her blue eyes crackled with vigour. “Unless we come up with a standard programming language,” Grace warned our group that afternoon, “the computer industry is dead in the water.”
The occasion was a 1964 meeting of the Business Equipment Manufacturing Association in New York. The subject was one of her favourites: the need to knock down the “Tower of Babble” that made computers so difficult to use.
Since each machine produced at that time was unique, people had to master
a new language brimming with mathematical symbols every time they used a different one.
As Grace launched into a riveting discussion on computer languages before some of the top thinkers in the field, I could see she was a born teacher. She had all the participants glued to their seats. “If you have 20 different light-bulb sizes, you need 20 different sockets,” Grace pointed out. “It’s the same with computers we’ve got to standardize.”
That day marked the beginning of my long friendship with “Amazing Grace”.
Even though she’d been there for the birth of the computer, what I couldn’t foresee was the enormous impact she would continue to have on the computer business, on the thousands of students who heard her lecture – and on me.
By then, at 29, I had graduated from Nottingham University and was a computer scientist at the University of Massachusetts – and already
a pretty good lecturer. But Grace’s example would help me bring lessons to life with colourful words and vivid examples.
Not long after our first meeting, I invited Grace to speak to my students. On the way from the airport, she chattered non-stop, bombarding me with questions and talking about her first love: computers. At that time, they were huge and rare and available only to professional programmers. But Grace assured me that computers would one day be small enough to sit on a desk, far more powerful than we could then imagine, and available to anyone at any time – in offices, schools, the home.
We’re already well on our way into that future, with 20 per cent of all British homes now having at least one computer. Much of the credit for this goes to Grace, who helped educate an industry. “I hope history will show”, she once told me, “that I was a pretty good teacher.”
Before teachers can teach, they must learn – and Grace started early. At seven, deciding she wanted to know how clocks worked, she dismantled her bedroom clock and then moved on to another. Later, Grace's mother found every alarm clock in the house in pieces. Grace was punished, but she knew how clocks worked. Grace Murray Hopper had a happy, active childhood in New York but her father suffered from hardening of the arteries and had to have both legs amputated in his forties.
Fitted with wooden legs and aided by canes, he went to his office, where he worked as an insurance broker, by train every day until his death at 74. Grace both admired and learned from her father’s fighting spirit. And with her analytical mind, she did well in school, excelling in science and mathematics. After graduating from Vassar College, New York, she earned a PhD in mathematics from Yale. By then, she had also married Vincent Hopper, an English lecturer at New York University. Returning to Vassar, she was made an associate professor of mathematics.
During the Second World War, she joined the navy. In one of those serendipitous moments that can alter history, the navy in 1944 assigned Grace to the Bureau of Ordnance Computation Project at Harvard University. There, navy scientist Lieutenant-Commodore Howard Aiken had developed the first fully functional digital computing machine. Called
Harvard Mark I, the machine was a marvel of its time. “It was the biggest, fanciest gadget I’d ever seen,”Grace told me. “I had to discover how it worked.” With 750,000 parts and 500 miles of electrical wire, Harvard Mark I could tear through calculations in a day that would take six months manually.
Under Grace’s guiding hand, it churned out ballistic tables for aiming Naval guns, schedules for supplying ships, even top-secret calculations that helped develop the atomic bomb.
Mark I was soon replaced by the faster Mark II. One day in 1945, the new machine suddenly choked on a simple calculation. Pulling out her pocket mirror and peering behind the front panel, Grace spotted the problem: a moth had perched on a relay. When the relay snapped shut, it flattened the moth between its contacts, and the computer stopped running. Grace and her team removed the squashed insect with tweezers. Then they taped the dead moth into a log book and scrawled next to it: “First actual case of a bug being found.” The event gave Grace an excuse whenever Aiken stormed in and demanded, “Why aren't you making numbers?" "Because", she would reply with a sly smile, “we’re debugging the computer.” The term stuck.
When the war ended, Grace accepted a commission in the Naval Reserve. She also became a senior mathematician for a Pennsylvania firm working on UNIVAC, the world’s first fully electronic commercial computer. By then, Grace and her husband had divorced amicably.
Most experts believed that computers were simply too complicated and expensive for anyone but highly trained scientists to understand. But Grace scoffed at this. If computers were easier to operate, she insisted, more people would use them.
To make her point, Grace began working on a “compiler” to translate ordinary English words into numerals – ones and zeros – that a computer could understand. Her colleagues told her this was a waste of time. But by 1955, Grace had unveiled a prototype programming language containing some 20 ordinary words – business terms such as inventory, price and product – that UNIVAC could understand. This breakthrough ultimately led to COBOL. (Common Business-Orientated Language). Along with FORTRAN, developed by John Backus of IBM for scientific problems, COBOL revolutionized the computer industry. Almost anyone could now “talk” with computers and use them to keep records and manage inventories.
In December 1966, at the age of 60, Grace was mandatorily retired from the navy. It was the saddest day of her life. However, her sadness was short-lived.
The Vietnam War had intensified, and despite COBAL, the navy’s computers couldn’t communicate with one another, and millions of pounds’ worth of supplies were getting lost. Thus, in August 1967, the navy recalled Grace to “temporary" active duty. Her mission: to make all the navy's computers work smoothly together in six months. Grace’s “temporary” tour of duty stretched into two decades. Not only did she tweak the navy’s computers into co-operating .but she discovered a new calling: that of computer evangelist, educator and prophet. Soon she was spending some 300 days a year on the road, lecturing around the country.
I invited Grace to address my students as often as possible. They loved her, and she loved them, my favourite of her techniques was the way she illustrated the speed at which computers operated. She would hold up a piece of wire. “This is a nanosecond,” she announced. “It’s 11-8 inches long. It’s the exact distance an electrical signal travels in a billionth of a second.” Then Grace went on to illustrate other concepts of time. “This is how far electricity travels in a millionth a second,” she would say, hauling out of a spool of wire 984 feet long. Finally, she apologized for not having a piece of wire small enough to hold a Pico-second, a trillionth of a second. “Go to a fast-food restaurant, and you'll get a packet of picoseconds there. They’re labelled ‘pepper’.” Above all, Grace urged students to stand by their beliefs and principles, and to believe in themselves. “Take risks” she admonished them. “A ship in port is safe, but that is not what ships are for. Sail out to sea and do new things.
Awards and honours flowed to Grace. She earned 40 honorary doctorates and was the first American to he made a Distinguished Fellow by the British Computer Society. Because of her age her promotion to captain in 1973 and then commodore in 1983 took special acts of Congress, In November 1985, Congress again conferred special recognition, elevating Grace to rear-admiral – the first woman to hold that rank. Finally, just four months shy of her eightieth birthday, Admiral Grace Murray Hopper’s retirement ceremony took place – at her request on board “Old Ironsides”, built in 1797 and the oldest commissioned ship in the navy. “We belong together,” Grace said. “After all, I’m the oldest sailor in the navy.”
I was in Britain when my wife phoned on New Year’s Day, 1992: "Grace died in her sleep last night." Admiral Grace Murray Hopper was buried with full military honours on January 7, 1992. When the family entered the chapel, an organist played “Amazing Grace”.
In many ways, Grace will live on with all of us. The navy has named its Data Automation Centre in San Diego after her, and a new guided-missile destroyer – the USS Hopper – will soon patrol the seas. But the memorial that would probably please Grace the most is the one that recurs every autumn as students return to college with books – and, more and more, personal computers.
http://www.arlingtoncemetery.net/ghopper-01.jpg
USS Hopper (http://www.militaryimages.net/photopost/showphoto.php/photo/27279/limit/recent)
Bute J.A,N. Lee, is one of the world’s Leading experts on computer languages.
He is currently a professor of computer science at Virginia Tech, and
Editor-in-chief, of the US Annals of the History of Computing.