American computer scientist and United States Navy officer (1906–1992)
She taught computers to understand English. Grace Hopper's insight — that programming languages could be built on words instead of raw machine code — laid the groundwork for COBOL and made software legible to generations of people who would never touch a soldering iron.
Grace Hopper held a Ph.D. in mathematics from Yale and taught at Vassar before leaving academia to join the Navy Reserve in World War II. In 1944 she joined the Harvard Mark I team and wrote what's considered the first computer manual. By 1949 she was at Eckert–Mauchly, working on UNIVAC I and managing compiler development. She finished her A-0 linker in 1952, led the release of FLOW-MATIC in 1954, and in 1959 helped create COBOL through the CODASYL consortium — a machine-independent language built on English terms that she championed through the 1960s. She retired a rear admiral, collected fo…
Sourced, dated quotes from Grace Hopper
I had a running compiler and nobody would touch it. ... they carefully told me, computers could only do arithmetic; they could not do programs.
[The Computer] was the first machine man built that assisted the power of his brain instead of the strength of his arm.
There's something you learn in your first boot-camp, or training camp: If they put you down somewhere with nothing to do, go to sleep — you don't know when you'll get any more.
I handed my passport to the immigration officer, and he looked at it and looked at me and said, "What are you?
In total desperation, I called over to the engineering building, and I said, "Please cut off a nanosecond and send it over to me.
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