One of Grace Hopper’s most frequently used utterances was – “The only phrase I’ve ever disliked is, ‘…we’ve always done it that way. ‘ I always tell young people, ‘Go ahead and do it.’” She was a computing pioneer and a Rear Admiral in the United States Navy. Both of these achievements were phenomenal for a woman born in 1906, and she managed this partly because she did not believe in continuing to do what had always been done.
Grace was a mathematics genius. After graduating from Vasser, she went on to Yale to complete her master’s and then her PhD. She taught maths at Vasser until she decided she wanted to serve her country in the 1940s. She joined the Navy and was assigned to Harvard University to work on the Ordnance Computation Project. This developed the Mark 1, 11, and 111 computers, and later she worked on the first commercial electronic computer, the UNIVAC.
Grace was convinced that computers would be more useful if more people could use them, and knew that this would happen if people could use ordinary English rather than machine code. In 1957, she developed FLOW-MATIC, the first compiler, and shortly afterwards COBOL, the Common Business Oriented Language.
COBOL was immensely successful and is still widely used today, particularly in legacy mainframe systems.
Some readers may remember the Y2K issue, when it was thought the world might end at midnight on 31 December 1999, because satellites would fall out of the sky and submarines would not function. The reason for the panic was that the computer programs used for many of the operating systems showed the date as dd/mm/yy or mm/dd/yy. To transition to the year 2000, four digits needed to be available for the year, otherwise the date would revert to an incorrect day. Only two digits had been used originally because the cost of computer data storage was so high back in the fifties and sixties, when many of those programs had been written.
In 1999, our CISO Clive was employed by the UK government to help users of these systems navigate their Y2K issues. In addition, many of the original COBOL programmers had a field day, being called back from retirement at vast cost to do the job.
People today poopoo similar warnings such as the climate change emergency, citing the fact that the Y2K issue had proved to be a damp squib. However, it is precisely because the date issue was identified and rectified that those systems continued to run. A great deal of work was done, although there was still an element of crossed fingers in case any important systems had been missed!
After her retirement in 1986, Grace Hopper continued to work as a consultant until her death at 85 from natural causes.
Diana Catton – by-line and other articles
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