[TUHS] Grace Hopper

Dave Horsfall dave at horsfall.org
Sun Dec 9 06:04:45 AEST 2018


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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