Nov 2014 SPOTLIGHT ON ”Amazing Grace”

 First woman to graduate from Yale with a PhD in Mathematics.  Joins the Navy as an officer after President Roosevelt authorizes the formation of the Navy WAVES (Women Accepted for Volunteer Emergency Service.  Lieutenant Grace Hopper serves as operational head of the first computer during WWII, the Harvard Mark I.  Works with mathematician John von Neumann to solve the famous implosion problem for the Nuclear bomb.  Joins Eckert-Mauchly Computer Corp, the first computer start-up company.  Invents the compiler, the cornerstone of all high end programming languages.  1953 Named director of automatic programming for the first commercial computer, UNIVAC.  1959 Influential in the creation of COBOL –which becomes the most successful computer language to date and accounts for 70% of active code.

 1967 to Director of the Navy Programming Languages Group in the Navy's Office of Information Systems Planning and was promoted to the rank of captain in She developed validation software for COBOL and its compiler as part of a COBOL standardization program for the entire Navy.  Retired from the Navy on August 14, At a celebration held in Boston on the USS Constitution, Hopper was awarded the Defense Distinguished Service Medal, the highest non-combat decoration awarded by the Department of Defense. At the time of her retirement, she was the oldest active-duty commissioned officer in the United States Navy (79 years, eight months and five days).  Senior consultant to Digital Equipment Corp., a position she retained until her death in 1992, aged 85.

 Hopper was awarded the inaugural Computer Sciences Man of the Year award from the Data Processing Management Association  The annual Grace Murray Hopper Award for Outstanding Young Computer Professionals was established in 1971 by the Association for Computing Machinery  First person from the United States and the first woman of any nationality to be made a Distinguished Fellow of the British Computer Society.  Received the AAUW Achievement Award  Received an Honorary Doctor of Letters from Western New England College (now Western New England University)  1986 – Upon retirement she received the Defense Distinguished Service Medal  Becomes a Computer History Museum Fellow Award Recipient  Received the Golden Gavel Award at the Toastmasters International convention in Washington, DC.

 First female recipient of the National Medal of Technology "For her pioneering accomplishments in the development of computer programming languages that simplified computer technology and opened the door to a significantly larger universe of users."  Elected a Fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences  USS Hopper (DDG-70) was launched. Nicknamed Amazing Grace, it is on a very short list of U.S. military vessels named after women  The Gracies, the Government Technology Leadership Award were named in her honor  The Department of Energy's National Energy Research Scientific Computing Center named its flagship system "Hopper”  Office of Naval Intelligence creates the Grace Hopper Information Services Center  Google Doodle animation for Hopper's 107th birthday with her sitting at a computer, using COBOL to print out her age where a moth flies out of the computer at the end  Awarded 40 honorary degrees from universities worldwide in her lifetime

The most important thing I've accomplished, other than building the compiler, is training young people. They come to me, you know, and say, 'Do you think we can do this?' I say, "Try it." And I back 'em up. They need that. I keep track of them as they get older and I stir 'em up at intervals so they don't forget to take chances.