Women in IT - The Story of Grace Hopper

The achievements of Grace Hopper

Hopper was instrumental in the advancement of mechanisation and the development of the modern concept of coding. She shaped projects such as the Mark I, Mark II and UNIVAC. One of her most impressive achievements was the development of the first compiler (A-0) in 1952 and the resulting ability to convert intelligible language into computer language. With the programming language FLOW-MATIC and its compiler (1957), she also did decisive preliminary work for the development of the programming language COBOL.

Grace Hopper and Debugging
While Hopper was working on the Mark II, a computer relay failed in 1947. A technician from Hopper's team found a moth that had entered the machine. After the insect was removed, Hopper pasted the moth in her logbook, supplemented by the phrase: "First actual case of bug being found." Since then, she is often credited with inventing the term "debugging". However, the term "bug" as used for errors was not new at all. It had already been used by engineers in the previous century. Nevertheless, Hopper's words were formative for the use of the term in computer science.

Women in IT - Forgotten Pioneers?

The Eniac, successor to the Mark I, was also programmed by six women, among others. In photos, Kathleen McNulty, Frances Bilas, Elizabeth Jean Jennings, Frances Elizabeth Snyder, Ruth Lichterman and Marilyn Wescoff are shown next to the big machine. Nevertheless, in February 1946, only the men involved in the project were acknowledged at the official launch of the Eniac. It was only after Kathy Kleiman, a doctoral student at Harvard University, did more research years later that the story was revisited. Successfully, as it turned out. Fifty years later, in June 1997, the Eniac women programmers were honoured at a ceremony in Silicon Valley. All six women were inducted into the WITI Hall of Fame.

Final thoughts

In today's world, programming is increasingly seen as a man's job. Yet it was mainly women who made decisive progress in the field of information technology in the beginning. Software programming needs to be made more accessible to women again, not least by telling their stories.

Further information

The Smithsonian's Computer History Project interviewed Grace Hopper in the late 1960s and early 1970s. In 1972, Hopper donated papers and various items related to her work with computers to the museum. More information on this and Hopper herself can be found here. The logbook with the "bug" in it can be viewed online here.