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The Digital Century

We remember 100 computing events (crucial, improbable, or downright absurd) that changed our lives, opened our eyes, or made us smile.

  

Amazing Grace

Without standard programming languages, computing would be a Tower of Babel­style mess. Much of the credit for making order out of the chaos goes to Grace Murray Hopper--a Vassar math professor, a rear admiral in the U.S. Naval Reserve, and one of the first women to make a mark in the world of computing.

Hopper questioned conventions all her life. By 1955, prompted by a desire to write programs that would allow nonscientists to use computers, she'd developed Flow-matic--the first computing language to use words such as "count" and "display." In 1959 that program grew into Common-Business-Oriented Language, which Hopper wrote with colleagues at the Eckert-Mauchly Computer Corporation. COBOL revolutionized the way computers operated, marking the first time they responded to words rather than numbers.

Former students remember Hopper as a colorful and dynamic character. "I was a freshman at Vassar in 1934 and I was completely enamored with [her] teaching," remembers Winifred Asprey, the founder of the computer science department at Vassar. "She also taught me how to smoke."

--Aoife McEvoy

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