9 Dec
2018
9 Dec
'18
2:04 a.m.
We gained Rear Admiral Grace Hopper on this day in 1906; known as "Amazing
Grace", she was a remarkable woman, both in computers and the Navy. She
coined the term "debugging" when she extracted a moth from a set of relay
contacts from a computer (the Harvard Mk I) and wrote "computer debugged"
in the log, taping the deceased Lepidoptera in there as well. She was
convinced that computers could be programmed in an English-like language
and developed Flow-Matic, which in turn became, err, COBOL... She was
posthumously awarded the Presidential Medal of Freedom in 2016 by Barack
Obama.
-- Dave
9 Dec
9 Dec
9:31 a.m.
I got to meet her a couple times. I got a nanosecond from her twice
and lost both of them. One story she told was of navigating tokyo
using an international language ... Cobol.
On Sat, Dec 8, 2018 at 12:06 PM Dave Horsfall <dave(a)horsfall.org> wrote:
We gained Rear Admiral Grace Hopper on this day in 1906; known as "Amazing
Grace", she was a remarkable woman, both in computers and the Navy. She
coined the term "debugging" when she extracted a moth from a set of relay
contacts from a computer (the Harvard Mk I) and wrote "computer debugged"
in the log, taping the deceased Lepidoptera in there as well. She was
convinced that computers could be programmed in an English-like language
and developed Flow-Matic, which in turn became, err, COBOL... She was
posthumously awarded the Presidential Medal of Freedom in 2016 by Barack
Obama.
-- Dave
10:19 p.m.
Hi Dave.
We went through this last year:
Dave Horsfall <dave(a)horsfall.org> wrote:
We gained Rear Admiral Grace Hopper on this day in
1906; known as "Amazing
Grace", she was a remarkable woman, both in computers and the Navy. She
coined the term "debugging"
According to https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Debugging#Origin_of_the_term:
The terms "bug" and "debugging" are popularly attributed to
Admiral Grace Hopper in the 1940s.[1] While she was working on a
Mark II computer at Harvard University, her associates discovered
a moth stuck in a relay and thereby impeding operation, whereupon
she remarked that they were "debugging" the system. However,
the term "bug", in the sense of "technical error", dates back
at least to 1878 and Thomas Edison (see software bug for a
full discussion). Similarly, the term "debugging" seems to have
been used as a term in aeronautics before entering the world of
computers. Indeed, in an interview Grace Hopper remarked that
she was not coining the term[citation needed]. The moth fit
the already existing terminology, so it was saved. A letter
from J. Robert Oppenheimer (director of the WWII atomic bomb
"Manhattan" project at Los Alamos, NM) used the term in a letter
to Dr. Ernest Lawrence at UC Berkeley, dated October 27, 1944,[2]
regarding the recruitment of additional technical staff.
Please update your notes ...
Thanks,
Arnold
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