The late Rear Admiral Grace Hopper was a gifted mathematician and undisputed pioneer in computer programming, honored posthumously in 2016 with the Presidential Medal of Freedom. She was also very much in demand as a speaker in her later career. Hopper's famous 1982 lecture on "Future Possibilities: Data, Hardware, Software, and People," has long been publicly unavailable because of the obsolete media on which it was recorded. The National Archives and Records Administration (NARA) finally managed to retrieve the footage for the National Security Agency (NSA), which posted the lecture in two parts on YouTube (Part One embedded above, Part Two embedded below).

Hopper earned undergraduate degrees in math and physics from Vassar College and a PhD in math from Yale in 1930. She returned to Vassar as a professor, but when World War II broke out, she sought to enlist in the US Naval Reserve. She was initially denied on the basis of her age (34) and low weight-to-height ratio, and also because her expertise elsewhere made her particularly valuable to the war effort. Hopper got an exemption, and after graduating first in her class, she joined the Bureau of Ships Computation Project at Harvard University, where she served on the Mark I computer programming staff under Howard H. Aiken.

She stayed with the lab until 1949 and was next hired as a senior mathematician by Eckert-Mauchly Computer Corporation to develop the Universal Automatic Computer, or UNIVAC, the first computer. Hopper championed the development of a new programming language based on English words. "It's much easier for most people to write an English statement than it is to use symbols," she reasoned. "So I decided data processors ought to be able to write their programs in English and the computers would translate them into machine code."

Her superiors were skeptical, but Hopper persisted, publishing papers on what became known as compilers. When Remington Rand took over the company, she created her first A-0 compiler. This early achievement would one day lead to the development of COBOL for data processors, which is still the major programming language used today.

“Grandma COBOL”

In November 1952, the UNIVAC was introduced to America by CBS news anchor Walter Cronkite as the presidential election results rolled in. Hopper and the rest of her team had worked tirelessly to input voting statistics from earlier elections and write the code that would allow the calculator to extrapolate the election results based on previous races. National pollsters predicted Adlai Stevenson II would win, while the UNIVAC group predicted a landslide for Dwight D. Eisenhower. UNIVAC's prediction proved to be correct: Eisenhower won over 55 percent of the popular vote with an electoral margin of 442 to 89.  

Hopper retired at age 60 from the Naval Reserve in 1966 with the rank of commander but was subsequently recalled to active duty for many more years, thanks to congressional special approval allowing her to remain beyond the mandatory retirement age. She was promoted to commodore in 1983, a rank that was renamed "rear admiral" two years later, and Rear Admiral Grace Hopper finally retired permanently in 1986. But she didn't stop working: She became a senior consultant to Digital Equipment Corporation and "goodwill ambassador," giving public lectures at various computer-related events.

One of Hopper's best-known lectures was delivered to NSA employees in August 1982. According to a National Security Agency press release, the footage had been preserved in a defunct media format—specifically, two 1-inch AMPEX tapes. The agency asked NARA to retrieve that footage and digitize it for public release, and NARA did so. The NSA described it as "one of the more unique public proactive transparency record releases... to date."

Hopper was a very popular speaker not just because of her pioneering contributions to computing, but because she was a natural raconteur, telling entertaining and often irreverent war stories from her early days. And she spoke plainly, as evidenced in the 1982 lecture when she drew an analogy between using pairs of oxen to move large logs in the days before large tractors, and pairing computers to get more computer power rather than just getting a bigger computer—"which of course is what common sense would have told us to begin with." For those who love the history of computers and computation, the full lecture is very much worth the time.

Listing image by Lynn Gilbert/CC BY-SA 4.0