Don't forget about Rear
Admiral Grace Hopper, who joined the Navy in World War II and was promptly
ushered into a top-secret project at Harvard and put in charge of programming
the experimental new Mark I computer to break enemy codes. She wrote some of
the first software ever for a real general-purpose computer.
She came to be
called "Amazing Grace"
because she always got the job done, even when that meant figuring out how to do
things no one had ever done before. She was a self-starter, doing the things
that needed to be done, whether her superiors understood them or not. (The
famous quote "It's easier to ask for forgiveness than it is to get permission"
is attributed to her).
After the war, she worked on the UNIVAC I and wrote
the first compiler for it. She helped create COBOL so that programmers could
get things done in something higher-level than assembly language (and don't
laugh, even if COBOL is a relic of the past now, it was an important
accomplishment back then!) She also invented the word "debugging" when her team
tracked down and removed an actual moth that had got stuck in the computer. She
also came up with the best
explanation of a nanosecond that I've ever seen! [ Reply to This | Parent | # ]
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