Amazing Grace
It would be difficult to find someone who has contributed more to the field of computer science than Admiral Grace Hopper. When America joined the second world war, Grace couldn’t face the idea of working as a teacher when the country needed her rare skills. She signed up to become a mathematician in the Navy Reserves. She thrived under the discipline and expectations of the Navy and quickly stood out amongst her fellow sailors.
Similar to the 6 women who worked on the ENIAC, Grace’s first job as a programmer was on the Mark I. The Mark I had been designed by the Navy to help the war effort. Grace helped John van Neumann input calculations for the mathematical model of the implosion of the atomic bomb. The Mark I was also used to create mathematical tables, coming full circle back to Babbage’s dreams of the previous century.
It was while crawling around inside the Mark II to fix a problem, that Grace’s team found a moth, the world’s first physical “bug”, wreaking havoc inside the delicate tubes and wires. She lovingly taped the moth to her logbook.
Just like the ENIAC, the Mark I didn’t have a manual, and Grace would have to figure out how to program it from its schematics. In fact, the lives of Grace Hopper, the ENIAC 6, and countless other female programmers were often intertwined, and they collaborated years later to create the first standard, cross-platform compiled programming language.
After Harvard’s contract with the Navy expired, Grace was let go, since the university didn’t offer promotions to women. Soon after, however, Grace also found herself working at Eckert-Mauchly, along with Jean Bartik and many of the ENIAC 6. Jean had called it a “technical Camelot”. There, at a time when many women were leaving the workplace to make space for returning soldiers, the company was actively hiring women. Not only that, but they also offered company sponsored programming courses, to increase their pool of talent.
“That’s how so many secretaries got to be programmers before we were through. A gal who was a good secretary was bound to become a programmer, meticulous, careful about getting things right. Step-by-step attitude. The things that made them good secretaries were the very things that made them good programmers.” — Grace Hopper
Grace worked alongside Betty Holberton as well. She considered Betty to be the best programmer she’d ever met. Betty taught Grace an approach of using a flowchart to map out the design of a program, something that good programmers still do to this day.
The company was sold to Remington Rand which mainly dealt in typewriters and other office supplies. As is the case in many corporations today, Remington Rand did not place much value in programmers or computers. They didn’t understand what the women were doing and didn’t respect their expertise. They overpromised to customers and production of new computer systems crawled to a halt as the engineers and programmers became overburdened.
Life at work became extremely difficult for both Grace and Jean. Jean described working at Remington Rand as a terrible place to work and quit soon after to focus on raising her family. Jean was so busy that she asked not to be called in to help until the engineers have spent at least 4 hours on a problem.
In line with Moore’s law, computers became faster and more sophisticated at an alarming rate. However, programming was still stuck in the previous age. Physically moving switches and relays had changed into manually creating machine code. However, you would have to rewrite every program for every system that came along after it, since it was heavily tied to the architecture of the underlying system.
Furthermore, it became clear that there just weren’t enough mathematicians in the world to do the now sought-after job of computer programming. The mental overhead cost of translating human language into ones and zeros was much too high to keep up with the rate of innovation and change.
Grace realised that in order to fix programming, there would have to be some standardisation in the discipline. Looking back at her experience as a programmer, Grace knew that you could reuse many of the operations, and grew tired of rewriting the same subroutines every time a new computer was invented. She thought that she could produce a higher-level language, closer to English, that could then be translated into machine code.
At Remington Rand, Grace worked on her first compiler, the A-0 system. It and its successors, the A-1, A-2 (ARITH-MATIC), AT-3 (MATH-MATIC) and B-0 (FLOW-MATIC) were provided with the UNIVAC computer to customers. The A-2’s source code was an example of the world’s first open source project since the source code was provided to customers, who could provide suggestions and improvements to the team.
Grace’s initial experiments with compiled languages were not celebrated by all her contemporaries. Many believed that the code produced by these compilers would be slow and that it would open the field to too many unqualified programmers.
However, in an unprecedented move of collaboration, in 1959 the CODASYL committee was formed to create a standard programming language. Grace was consulted throughout the process, and her early work formed the basis of the programming language COBOL, which is still used widely today. Most businesses still rely on the old mainframes, usually built on COBOL, for their day to day operations.
COBOL is not a loved programming language by a long shot. The famous computer scientist, Edsger Dijkstra said, “the use of COBOL cripples the mind; its teaching should, therefore, be regarded as a criminal offence.” However, as Jean Sammet, who was on the CODASYL committee, put it, “usefulness and elegance are not necessarily the same thing.”
Throughout her career Grace’s mission seems to have been to make programming if not easier, more accessible, and to ease the little struggles she had to face day-to-day as a programmer. It was this attitude that shaped how we write software today. In the words of Howard Aiken, the designer of the Mark I computer Grace first learned to program on, “Grace was a good man”.
This article is part of a series of stories about the history of women in tech I’m writing in preparation for my talk at DevConf 2019. See my previous post in the series.
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