1950's Science and Technology | 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...