Grace Murray Hopper was the creator of the COBOL language
as well as the first compiler (for COBOL) and is known as the
first female "hacker" in history.
She was born Grace Brewster Murray on December 9, 1906 in
New York City, to a family with a military tradition.
In 1928, she graduated in mathematics and physics from Vassar
College, at that time a private college for women only. In 1930,
Hopper received her master's degree in mathematics from Yale University. She also earned her Ph.D. in
mathematics from Yale University in 1934. It is worth mentioning that a relatively high number of women
earned their doctorates during the 1920s and 1930s, a number that was not reached until 1980. During World
War II, she enlisted in the military and was sent to Harvard to complete her studies in engineering and applied
physics in the computer laboratory. From 1944, she began working with Aiken (another computing pioneer) on
the Harvard Mark 1 computer. She was the third person to program it. At the end of the war, Hopper was
working on the Harvard Mark II computer. In 1945, while working on this machine, Hopper and her colleagues
encountered a problem. Searching the room where the computer was housed, they located a moth trapped in
one of the 17,000 relays. Hopper was the first person to refer to a computer problem as a bug and to use the
term “debug.” In 1949, she joined the Eckert-Mauhly Computer Corporation as a senior mathematician to work
on the UNIVAC electromechanical computer. She was the creator of the first computer compiler in 1952. This
revolutionary software allowed for the first automatic programming of a computer language. She said that she
designed the first compiler because she was lazy and that she wanted the programmer to become a
mathematician again. She was also part of the development team for Flow-Matic, the first command-based
data processing compiler in English for payroll calculations. In 1959, she also invented COBOL (Common
Business Oriented Language), the first common programming language for administration. She subsequently
worked on the international standardization of programming languages and worked heavily on validation
procedures. During this time, she combined her work in the private sector with her work as an academic at
various universities and in the Navy Reserve, until her retirement with the rank of Commander. However, in
1967 she was called back to active service to standardize the Navy's high-level languages. In 1973, already in
the reserve, she was the first woman to reach the rank of captain. She retired definitively in 1986 as a rear
admiral, being the oldest person to retire from the US Navy. After her retirement, she joined the Digital
Equipment Corporation (DEC) company, where she worked until her death. She died at the age of 85 in
Arlington, Virginia, in 1992. She was buried with military honors.
