The Rear Admiral and the Computer Bug
Admiral Grace Murray Hopper 1906-1992


With a degree in mathematics, Grace Hopper taught at Vassar until she joined the Navy WAVES (Women Accepted for Voluntary Emergency Service) in 1943. She joined Howard Aiken (a Naval Reserve lieutenant) at Harvard and went to work programming MARK I. Her best-known contribution to computing was the compiler, an intermediate program that translates English language instruction to the language of the target computer.

Nicknamed "Amazing Grace," she spent forty years in computing, and was the nation's oldest active-duty officer when she retired in 1986. Hopper's discovery of a moth in her computer which she then, tongue-in-cheek, pasted in her computer logbook, is said to be the first computer "bug."

	Grace Hopper: The First Woman to Program the First Computer in the United States by Christy Marx, 2003

	Grace Hopper: Computer Pioneer by Joanne Mattern, 2003