Grace Hopper

Grace Hopper, (1906 - 1992), is an American mathematician and rear admiral in the U.S. Navy, who was a pioneer in developing computer technology, helping to devise UNIVAC I, the first commercial electronic computer, and naval applications for COBOL (common-business-oriented language). She wrote the first computer manual, A Manual of Operation for the Automatic Sequence Controlled Calculator (1946), which was the first extensive treatment of how to program a computer. She remained at Harvard as a civilian research fellow while maintaining her naval career as a reservist. After a moth infiltrated the circuits of Mark I, she coined the term bug to refer to unexplained computer failures. Hoppe...View all