The Digital Century

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