You may have read about Grace Hopper before on the Rocket Yard in our Women in Tech series. Hopper was considered one of the first computer scientists. She began her career by working as a mathematics professor at Vassar until 1943 when she joined the US Naval Reserve and was assigned to the Bureau of Ships Computation Project at Harvard where she was one of the first programmers of America’s first programmable digital computer—the Mark I.
ESPN’s statistical analysis website FiveThirtyEight.com has also shined a spotlight on Hopper and her amazing accomplishments. The website recently put together a short and entertaining video that tells the story of “The Queen of Code”.
Check out the video below to learn more about the life of Grace Hopper.
thank you for sharing
I began my computer career with a UNIVAC at IIT Research. Some of the equipment still had Eckert Mauchly Labels. Grace was to Coding as Turing was to the actual concept of a true general purpose computer. Having to code in Octal before being able to use a language like ALGOL, COBOL or FORTRAN, etc. gives a person a greater understanding of how important her concept of a language was to all of us.