[COFF] Happy birthday, Grace Hopper!

Dave Horsfall dave at horsfall.org
Mon Dec 9 09:50:50 AEST 2019


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


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