Grace Murray Hopper by Dan Gestine

Grace Brewster Murray was born in New York City on December 9, 1906. She was a graduate of Vassar College, with a Bachelors Degree in Physics and Math. After graduating she decided she would like to teach at Vassar. She finished her Math studies at Yale University, where she received her Masters degree in 1930 and PhD in 1934.

In 1943 Grace joined the navy and lectured for the United States Naval Reserve. After retiring for seven months, she decided to return to duty in the Navy as a leader in the Naval Data Automation Command. After this, she finally retired and became a senior consultant to the Digital Equipment Corporation, working there well until her eighties.

Her first work was on the Mark I computer. She was the third person to program the Mark I. For her work she received the Naval Ordnance Development Award. She finished other programming applications on all three of the popular computers; The Mark I, Mark II, and the Mark III. She worked on these computers in the Cruft Laboratory.

In 1949, Grace risked her career to join the Eckert-Mauchly Computer Corporation. This corporation wanted to provide computers to different work companies and businesses. Together, the company needed to build computers and be able to make them user-friendly so business men could understand them and making computers useful in everyway possible.

Grace Murray Hopper began yet another pioneering effort on UNIVAC I, the first large-scale electronic digital computer. Admiral Hopper came up with a great idea of taking the most common portions of programs and applications and sharing them with other programmers to save time and work. Since this was such an early stage of computing, they had to hand copy these shared libraries of code. This reduced errors, tedium, and duplication of the same effort put in earlier.

Hopper was one of two women named fellow of the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers. In 1979, she won IEEE's McDowell Award and in 1985, Grace Murray Hopper was appointed Rear Admiral by President Ronald Reagan. She was the nation's oldest military officer on active duty. After her retirement from the Navy she accepted a position with Digital Equipment Corporation as a senior consultant, where she remained until her death. In 1991 President George Bush awarded her the National Medal of Technology. She was the first individual to receive it. She died in her sleep on January 1, 1992. She was living in Arlington, Virginia at the time.