Grace Hopper

Resources

• Slides

Video Script

Our next famous woman in computer science that we’ll be talking about is Rear Admiral Grace Hopper. Grace Hopper enlisted in the Navy and worked on the Harvard Mark I computer, as well as the UNIVAC, a successor to the ENIAC, and we’ll talk about the UNIVAC and ENIAC computers in another lecture. So grace also developed a programming language called FlowMatic which was later adapted into a language called COBOL, which is still somewhat used today. COBOL is traditionally a language that was used very heavily in the financial industry, because it was used to generate a lot of financial reports. You don’t see it a whole lot now, you may see it used occasionally at places like banks, or accounting firms and things like that, but it’s not very widely used anymore.

But beyond that, she was a truly a pioneer and out of the box thinker for her entire life. And as you’ll see in the following videos, Grace Hopper is a pretty sassy lady but a pioneer in modern computing. She was also pretty famous for her description of a nanosecond in the Dave letterman show, which you’ll see here in just a little bit. Another thing here every year, there is a Grace Hopper conference to celebrate diversity and inclusion and women in computing. And so there’s actually scholarships available for students if you would like to attend this conference. And it’s something that I would highly recommend if you ever get the chance, it is truly a great experience to actually participate in.