American Decades
Hopper, Grace Murray 1906-1992
COMPUTER ENGINEER
Background.
Grace Hopper graduated from Vassar College in 1928 and entered Yale University, where she earned a Ph.D. in mathematics and physics in 1934. She returned to Vassar to teach, but World War II changed her career path.
UNIVAC.
In 1943 she joined the WAVES, (Women Accepted for Volunteer Emergency Service) as a lieutenant and was sent to the Bureau of Ordnance Computation Project, There she learned to program the Mark I, the world's first large digital computer. After the war she was a research fellow at Harvard for three years before she joined the Eckert-Mauchly Computer Corporation, which became a division of Remington Rand. By 1959 she was director of automatic program development for the UNIVAC division at Remington Rand, the first commercial computer. At Remington Rand, Hopper changed the computer forever.
Compiler.
Prior to her work computers were programmed...
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1950's Science and Technology
- Overview
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Topics in the News
- Chromosome Number in Humans
- Communication
- The Computer Comes of Age
- Computer Predicts Election
- Computer Technology: Evolving Science
- Cyclotron/Bevatron
- DNA
- Dental Drills: High Speed and Painless (More or Less)
- Fossil Dating
- H-Bomb
- ICBM
- Jets
- Mapping the Ocean Floor
- Maser/Laser
- The Microwave Oven
- The New Frontier
- Nuclear Submarines
- Oral Contraceptives
- Radio Astronomy
- Radioimmunoassay
- The Saint Lawrence Seaway
- Sex Change
- Telephones in the Age of Technology
- Television
- Transatlantic Cable
- The Transistor
- Women in Science and Technology
- Headline Makers
- People in the News
- Awards
- Deaths
- Publications
- Important Events in Science and Technology, 1950–1959
